


The Markings of a Man

by Temve



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Human, M/M, Tattoos, here be Maori
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-19
Updated: 2020-08-19
Packaged: 2021-03-06 00:16:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 26
Words: 50,746
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25994335
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Temve/pseuds/Temve
Summary: Padawan Jinn's focus is severely unsettled, and his reality, quite consequently, goes haywire. He finds himself in the middle of a land he can't even pronounce, and in the possession of a rude man with more lines on his face than Jinn can even begin to decipher.
Relationships: Qui-Gon Jinn/Obi-Wan Kenobi, Qui-Gon Jinn/Other(s)
Comments: 8
Kudos: 10





	1. (In which the weather on Coruscant is completely and utterly crap)

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings apply for slavery, dubious consent, and a Jedi Padawan with amnesia and a severe case of Stockholm syndrome.
> 
> Thanks and a big tattooed Maori!Qui to Frances who actually lives in that place Padawan Jinn can't pronounce (and where they can't pronounce him for lack of a 'j' sound!), and has so kindly offered to Kiwipick, check my wonky Maori and to generally be the Beta From Hell. So, if you find yourselves missing my usual rogue commas and the odd awkward phrase, you've got her to thank! 
> 
> Also, thank you to Dooku_the_Cat for insisting that this very old fic needs to see the light of day, and creating some impressive art for it!
> 
> Also also, any resemblance with actual Ngati Wainui alive and nonfictional is completely coincidental, and I am open to be educated about where my research may be lacking and fantasy has taken over. Also, what's up with the weather always being terrible in the first chapter of my longfics?! Anyway.

It was raining only by default, because Standard had no separate word for the weather that was currently enveloping the seventeenth southern district of Coruscant, and its hapless inhabitants. Stinging cold water sheeted almost horizontally through the air lanes and alleyways, leaving precious thin strings of air to breathe, fast, loud and yellow. 

The planet's large orange sun had sunk below the hypothetical horizon long ago, and was now launching a surprise attack on the battered air, turning it the heavy sickly shade of yellow that the native Coruscanti knew by the name of 'underhanded light'. It appeared to come from nowhere, as if the air had suddenly been dyed yellow, and cast an eerie glow over the rain-flecked crags of the city planet's architecture.

But the air had not only been dyed yellow. It had also been sped up quite a bit.

And however sophisticated the Republican engineering committee's methods of controlling the planet's climate had become, however much Coruscant's usual aspect actually resembled the high-resolution, high-gloss images broadcast all over the galaxy for comfort and reassurance, there were still days when a single unscheduled transport's exhaust trail could tip the fragile balance, and all the engineers could do was throw up their hands and sit back and watch as the moisture built up into rain-sodden black clouds and the wind whipped itself into a frenzy, and the underhanded light soaked into the bottom of the clouds and drenched the air...

Sit back and warn the public, of course. Only the indispensable and the aquatic would be out in this kind of weather.

The tall figure in the brown robe was neither, but apparently also far too serene to care, making his way through the sheets of rain, thick brown fabric clinging to the contours of a body that was surely soaked to the skin. Unfazed, face covered by the deep hood of the traditional Jedi robe, he strode along a passageway that was fast turning into a small and grimy but alarmingly rapid river, leaving little islands of turbulence where his boots disturbed the quivering rippled surface. Walking with the wind, at the same pace as the clouds that were racing across the sky, the lone Jedi nearly blended in with the weather, dark, wet and forbidding, and utterly determined. 

He did not stop when the sheet of bright red paper hit the back of his head with a thick wet slap. He did not stop when he heard the splish-splash of another pair of feet behind him, running. He did not stop when he felt a small hard hand grab the paper off him, the body it belonged to bumping quite rudely against his shoulder. He did not stop when he saw the feet and the body and the hand and the soaked sheet of red paper combining in his field of vision to reveal a short, stocky child holding the scrap, evidently the remnants of some supplementary newsprint, up by one corner and watching it flap desperately under the assault of the stinging rain. He did not stop when the kid frowned in disgust and balled the red paper up into a squishy lump.

He did stop when the little urchin threw the paper to the winds and stomped along his way.

"Do you have any idea what that is – that thing you just threw away?"

The voice was deep and slightly hoarse, cutting through the rush of the rain like a broad, nicked blade. The kid stopped, then shook his head at his own obedience and trooped on, not even glancing back over his shoulder.

"'s just rubbish, man. Nothin' to get worked up about, okay?"

"Exactly," the voice rumbled, now uncomfortably close. "And what would you say is that blue container half-sunk into the ground, just there against the wall, to your right?"

Involuntarily, the kid turned his head, then thought better of it and stared straight ahead. Who was this guy anyway, and what... he started for a second when a heavy hand dropped on to his shoulder from what felt like way up, then spun round and frowned into a broad, rain-glistening face, eyes as blue as the sky was not. 

"Bin," he offered, in a small voice.

"See? And I am sure you know what to use one of them for," the robed man lectured, almost warmly, the soaked and bedraggled state of his clothing somehow not managing to distract from the dignity he exuded with every word. 

The kid shrugged. "'Course I do."

"So," the man said, brightly, "care to show me?" 

And with that, he held out the hand that had gripped the kid's shoulder, and the sodden ball of red paper flew into it, up the street, against the roaring storm, and settled in the huge palm with a dirty splat. The kid gaped as he was offered the pathetic lump of paper as if on a silver platter, then took it gingerly, not quite sure if it might not be about to explode, and dropped it into the waste container set into the pavement against the near wall. 

"There, that wasn't difficult, was it?" the man said, approvingly, and the kid was sure he heard a hint of a smirk in that uneven low voice. Shaking himself out of his stunned silence, the urchin gave the robed man an appraising look, then spat, "Stupid bloody Jedi," and ran away as fast as he could, not pursued in the least by the stupid bloody Jedi.

*** 

And of course the rain was just beginning to let up as said Jedi reached the fringes of the Temple complex, striding easily through courtyards and alleys usually thronged with all manner of life forms. A couple of water-dwelling creatures were out and about, paying him no heed at all, and even the Temple guards, usually a more than merry bunch of failed Padawans loitering on the broad stairs playing sabacc and looking menacing, had retreated to the safety of their guardhouse. They nodded at the soaked figure as he strode past, acknowledging their recognition with a quick lift of a hand.

He dropped the robe outside the entrance to his quarters, a near-black puddle of sodden fabric at the end of a wet trail he had dragged through half the Temple, dotted with greyish boot-prints. The boots would have to come off too. And the leggings, clinging to his thighs coldly and heavily. His skin prickled as he roughly yanked them off, and he shivered in the cool stale air of the corridor. Might as well take the tunics off, he thought, unbuckling his belt and peeling off several layers of soaked-through cream linen, revealing, in the end, a chest that was of a quite similar pale colour, a very faint and slightly pathetic dusting of dark hairs clouding between tight dusky nipples drawn up tiny and hard from the cold. A trickle of fresh wetness trailed down the damp skin from the end of a near-black braid sticking to the tall youth's chest. Running a hand down the length, the young Jedi squeezed a few more drops onto the shapeless pile of wet clothing on the floor, then ruffled his short dark hair, sending droplets of water everywhere. Ah, that felt better. 

Rubbing his pale icy skin, the Padawan keyed the door open in nothing but his wrap, and slipped into the relative warmth of the windowless common room. 

A greying head turned, a pair of long, brown-clad legs nonchalantly slid off the low table, and an aristocratic eyebrow quirked upwards. Then, a voice that was midnight velvet to the Padawan's soft broadcloth spoke calmly.

"Home at last, Padawan?"

"Yes, Master. I apologise for the delay, but..."

The Master grinned and rearranged himself in his chair to cast an appraising look at his near-naked shivering Padawan. He was certainly turning out to be a fine young man, already as tall as himself, if a bit on the thin side. And strong in the Force. And usually so modest that a glimpse of bare flesh was a rare sight indeed. The Master filed it away for future reference and smiled indulgently.

"Get yourself into a hot shower, Qui-Gon, and hurry."

"Certainly, Master." And he was gone too fast for Master Dooku to decide whether that hint of a smirk had sprung from the boy's pale lips or from his unnaturally blue eyes.

Still, it was not like he had to decide any time soon.


	2. (In which Qui-Gon pays rather unexpected homage to his grand-Master)

"Master?"

Dooku looked up from his reading, a slow smile creeping across his face at the sight of his Padawan wrapped in a huge old towel which despite its size did not quite manage to conceal the young man's tall, gangly frame. His hair was a little lighter now that it was towel-dry, and closer to its usual brown than to the soaked black it had been when Qui-Gon had first dripped into the common room earlier that evening. And the lad's skin colour was closer to natural as well, a soft light olive tone that hinted at his unknown ancestry. For someone who had been delivered to the Temple as little more than transgalactic bulk freight with woefully incomplete papers, he was filling out into a very promising young Jedi. I'm surprised he hasn't had any offers yet, the Master mused idly. Or maybe he just had not told him... but then there was hardly anything imaginable in this universe more blankly honest than Padawan Jinn. Dooku wondered if the lad would receive more offers from boys or from girls, and unsuccessfully tried to picture his freshly-scrubbed, towel-wrapped young apprentice locked in a feverish tangle of limbs with either sex...

"Master?"

"Yes, Padawan?" 

Force bless shielding.

"Would it be appropriate for me to absent myself from Temple tonight to celebrate Padawan Llipe's naming day? She's inviting a few friends over for a little party, and..."

"Padawan Llipe? Dear Force, time flies, doesn't it? How old did you say she was?"

"Well, eighteen last week. But she put off the celebrations until she's achieved her ascension to SPad – um, Senior Padawan, I mean. Which she managed yesterday."

"And so she's organised a little something, huh? Must be quite the party if it's had to be moved out of Temple..."

"Oh, nothing like that," Qui-Gon added hastily, a small blush colouring his cheeks. "But you know she's always been popular with people, and... well, one of her civilian friends agreed to lend her his flat. With him in it, of course, and a handful of other close friends... and Padawans."

"Ah. Well, I don't see why you shouldn't be able to survive such a little outing, my Padawan. As long as you steer well clear of the stronger intoxicants on offer – you know a roaring drunk Jedi is not exactly the sort of item we would want to crop up on the planetary gossip circuit."

"Master!" Qui-Gon blushed slightly deeper, and Dooku found himself quite enjoying embarrassing the half-naked boy. "You know me well – I would never go near anything I cannot cope with. Besides, I do not require intoxicants to enjoy myself. With Llipe there, and Depa and Gesarinn and his brother..."

"Ah," the Master interrupted. "The merry bunch of Padawans. Of course, I forgot that intellectual pleasures and their enjoyment have not entirely died out among the younger generation of Jedi." He winked at Qui-Gon, who lightened noticeably at his Master's good humour. "I take it there'll be exotic food and interesting conversation, and board games and the like?"

Qui-Gon grinned involuntarily. "Well, if Llipe has anything to do with the cooking, I'm sure it'll be exotic food eventually. She tends to be of the school of stick it all in a pot and see what happens. Oh, and she said there would be music and maybe dancing, but..."

"Just how big is that friend's flat, do you reckon?"

"Exactly, Master. It's in mid-seventeenth, so it's probably one of these column-block affairs. And if the intimidating number of Jedi present won't keep the dancers in check, then I'm sure the downstairs neighbours will!"

Master Dooku smirked. "All right then, Qui-Gon. I can see you're not on a mission to besmirch the reputation of the Order, and I don't see why experimental food and dealing with intoxicated civilians shouldn't be part of your regular training regime anyway. Enjoy yourself, and make sure you're back by dawn. You know Yoda's beginning to turn from an early riser to a nocturnal creature in his old age, and I'd hate to have to answer prying questions about his latest grand-Padawan, all right?"

"Thanks, Master!" That rare smile lit up the broad face, and Qui-Gon dashed off into his chamber to get ready for the evening's revelries.

*** 

"Whoa, Qui. Nearly didn't recognise you!" Before he even had time to reply, Qui-Gon found himself with an armful of very merry Zabrak, straining to plant a wet kiss on the tall boy's chin and grinning all over her chocolate-brown face. "Let's have a look at you, hm? Didn't know you had any gear that isn't standard Jedi stuff..." The girl took a step backwards, raking admiring light yellow eyes up Qui-Gon's form, dressed as he was in rather baggy black trousers that concealed his boots almost completely, and a tight black short-sleeved thing over a tight green long-sleeved thing. "You look cool," the tiny Zabrak declared in a voice that sounded much older and more lived-in than her eighteen standard years. 

"Happy naming day, Llipe. Oh, and congratulations on your ascension as well – I see you've adopted the traditional bead, um, rather enthusiastically?"

Llipe grinned and ran a small brown hand through the mop of shiny short black hair on her head. In addition to the stubby ivory horns sticking out of it at regular intervals, she now sported a dazzling assortment of beads of all shapes and materials dangling from the ends of little braids, caught in elaborate loops of hair, or simply clipped into the slightly outgrown Padawan crop. "Yeah, Ril went a bit overenthusiastic this afternoon... but hey, he says it's traditional where he comes from, and who am I to complain? It's not like Master can see me here, y'know?"

Both grinned at the thought of Llipe's good-natured but appallingly conservative Master, a portly human female of undoubted pedagogic talents, but with little in the way of imagination. 

"Sorry I haven't brought you anything, but you know I've been busy lately..."

"Aw, Qui. You know you probably wouldn't even manage to fit a gift on top of the pile of stuff my other mates have brought... and, you know," she winked conspiratorially up at him, "those old astronomy exam questions you managed to track down were quite inestimable, you know?"

Qui-Gon blushed slightly, and told himself it was the warmth in what he assumed was Ril's flat. The place was quite lively already, about two dozen people lounging on assorted items of furniture as well as on boxes, piles of clothes, and simply on the floor, eating, laughing, and being noisy. He didn't recognise a single one of them.

"Come through here, Qui – the kitchen's where the real party is after all." Smirking, she dragged him by the wrist into an even warmer room that was even more cluttered, rickety shelves along the walls piled high with paper books, broken machinery of all kinds, empty bottles, full bottles, and a surprising number of potted plants doing reasonably well despite the sticky, smoke-wreathed atmosphere of the room. 

The smells were dazzling, rising from two large pots of something on the cooker (after one look under the lids, Qui-Gon decided it was two different instances of Llipe's standard recipe of throwing everything you can find in a given time together into one pot in a strictly made-up order. They had turned out different colours, and one smelled rather mouth-wateringly savoury) as well as from a huge bunch of slightly mangy trumpet flowers on the floor, several small incense burners scattered around various surfaces, various smoking implements in the mouths of various occupants of the room, and a veritable carnage of foodstuffs on the kitchen table. Standing around the table were a number of people either busy turning the carnage into something that resembled edible food, or busy eating it in its current state.

"Qui-Gon! Nice to see you, mate. So your Master let you go free, huh?" Qui-Gon grinned a little dumbly, trying to bite back an obvious comment about how odd Depa looked in her native culture's short loose dress, wielding a large knife and reeking of red onions. Quite appealing actually.

"Uh, yeah. He figured I could defend myself from people like you all right." He patted the other Padawan on the cheek and was rewarded with the point of the kitchen knife dragging across the smooth fabric of his shirt. "Make yourself comfortable or make yourself useful, Jinn. At any rate, have fun, and that's an order." 

Llipe's laugh rang out from the other end of the kitchen. "Give poor Qui a break, will ya? It's a tough and trying job being the perfect Padawan at all times, Deep... and look, he made the effort to come here, so I don't see why he wouldn't want to enjoy himself. If you want, Qui, you can help us with the biscuits here..."

"Oi, let a poor Padawan get a drink first, eh Llipe? I'm sure the lad is parched from the long and trying journey here, and would be more than happy to sample a nice large tumbler of Rillikmi's Special... wouldn't you, Qui?"

Qui-Gon grinned uncertainly at the genuinely large tumbler of translucent orange liquid, in the process of turning a deeper red as its creator dumped a handful of silverish sparkling ice cubes into the glass. "Oh, that, by the way, is our gracious host for tonight," Llipe interjected merrily, wriggling through the increasingly dense crowd in the kitchen to formally introduce the drink-bearer and the still-nonplussed Padawan. "Rillikmi, this is Qui-Gon Jinn, my agemate and invaluable fount of all knowledge. And much more fun than people say, so forget all you think you know about him, right? And Qui, shut up and have a drink."

Obediently, Qui-Gon closed his mouth and carefully sniffed the now blood-red drink, then took a cautious sip. It burned its way down his throat, leaving behind a pleasantly acidic tingle and a heavy fruit-scented warmth. It would do, certainly if he managed to spread the dose over the whole evening. Qui-Gon turned around gingerly, looking for a safe place to put his glass down, then decided that since he didn't know anyone but Depa and Llipe here, he might as well be where Llipe was, which was kneeling on the floor hunched over a large cardboard box covered with a waterproof tablecloth, engaged in esoteric cooking.

At least that's what Qui-Gon assumed it was. She was heating oil in a large spoon over a candle flame while kneading a small lump of something green in her other hand. Qui-Gon assumed that the tip of her tongue was sticking out of her mouth in concentration, but found himself proven wrong when she shot a very well-aimed droplet of spittle into the heated oil. It hissed angrily, and Llipe nodded, pleased with the result. 

"Can you hold that for a moment, Qui? Thanks."

She handed him the spoon, motioning for him to hold it low over the candle flame, then rolled the deep green lump into a thin string between her fingers and slowly lowered it into the hissing oil. It dissolved immediately, leaving a clear emerald green liquid.

"Perfect." She took the spoon from Qui-Gon's hand and tipped the contents into a bowl of what looked like ordinary biscuit dough to him, flour, spices, an inordinate number of tiny chilla eggs and the like. The green oil soaked into the flour immediately, turning the whole mixture green as Llipe vigorously beat the dough into submission. After a while, a larger and lighter version of the original little green lump sat in the bowl, and Llipe proudly dumped it on to the box's waxcloth-covered surface.

"Ooo-kay, biccie time!" she yelled rather unexpectedly, and minutes later an expectant crowd had gathered around the makeshift work surface, taking turns in fashioning the most outlandish shapes from the smooth green dough.

"Waitaminute, only one each – Ril, no cheating. I know you made that one, mate. Nobody else would _eat_ a sirhorn... Qui, what about you? Anything small and green spring to mind... Padawan?"

Qui-Gon blushed deeply as his portion of light green dough dropped into his palm from Llipe's smaller one. "C'mon, it's not like he can see things..."

That provoked an unprompted giggle from the bystanders, incomplete lines and jokes about seeing things that Qui-Gon didn't quite manage to catch as he worked on the piece of dough. I'm sure that's not quite the innocent silliness Master was thinking about, he thought to himself as he presented, with as much dignity as he could muster given the silliness of the task, a flat biscuit-dough likeness of the venerable Master Yoda. 

"Here's to the next eight hundred years, Llipe," Ril crowed and poured half his drink over his tunic, giggling uncontrollably. "Force biscuits, my... you Jedi are more wickeder than you'd think, huh?"

Qui-Gon still felt decidedly unwicked, but joined in the general enthusiastic toasting. Nobody stared at him disapprovingly for not pouring anything down his tunic, so he reckoned he would be all right. The evening might even turn out to be fun after all...


	3. (In which the concept of music is trying hard to be redefined)

"Yiiiiih, Fargren, what the hell are you..." The rest of the girl's shout drowned in tumultuous cheering and applause as she stood blazing in the middle of the crowded room, her elaborate hairdo illuminated by stray sparks from a handful of electric sparklers which a thin and weedy-looking Regati had stuck on top of the savagely regal array of deep red curls. Erratic tiny fires sizzled on and off in their prison of hair, showering the frightened girl with small shooting stars.

"Never mind her... she likes the attention, you know?" Qui-Gon started at the voice in his ear and whirled round to find that the slender Regati had suddenly materialised next to him. Nodding curtly and attempting what he hoped was an amused smile, he was acutely grateful for the relatively full state of his glass. Just in case anyone's idea of fun was setting fire to Padawan braids. That is, he thought, if Rillikmi's Special is actually weak enough not to catch fire itself. Considering his current situation, he decided to abandon that train of thought. He was here to have fun, after all, and it certainly looked like everyone else was doing so... the recently-incensed girl was just at this moment flinging herself at a gaggle of younger humans of both sexes, ostensibly to have her hair rearranged. But it was evident, and not just to Qui-Gon, he suspected, that there were only so many hands that would fit onto a human head, however elaborate the hairstyle... and the other hands would just have to go somewhere else. Not that the girl seemed to mind, wriggling and giggling with obvious amusement.

A loud parping noise pierced the general babble of voices, then died pathetically, followed by what Qui-Gon assumed to be a fierce curse in some language he had never heard in his life. Hardly anybody turned their heads to see, which seemed to enrage the originator of that noise greatly, perched as he was on a wobbly green stool in front of an ancient computer terminal that looked like it had been taken apart, scrapped, fossilised, excavated, stuffed and mounted, exhibited and finally sold for scrap by the museum several times over. On its flickering grey screen an improbable-looking tower of blocks in garish colours stood in silence. Which was more than could be said for the boy in front of the machine who was cussing a blue streak while simultaneously trying to elicit noises from both the computer terminal and an outlandish wind instrument moulded so perfectly to the contours of his face and upper body that it made movement rather difficult. Swearing, apparently, was not impeded by the mouthpiece, Qui-Gon thought amusedly.

It was only when the boy unplugged himself from his instrument (for want of a better word), letting his voice carry across the crowded room with all is natural force, that Qui-Gon realised it was Rillikmi himself. Shaking his head, the Padawan looked down into his drink. He could have sworn that Rillikmi had had pale yellow skin and extremely short hair when he'd first seen him an hour or so ago... and surely no amount of garish screen glare could turn that into mottled orange and long snaky braids? But the voice was unmistakably their host's, clamouring for Llipe in his bell-like tenor, the bell more than a little cracked from what Qui-Gon assumed must be a few too many of his very own Specials. 

Shaking his head, attempting to dislodge the faint air of illogic buzzing behind his eyes like a tiny fly, Qui-Gon decided to involve himself into the party a little more, if only to keep himself from standing on the sidelines with nothing to do but sip this apparently slightly dangerous concoction Ril had so graciously served him. For a while, he attempted to involve himself in a heated discussion on the pros and cons of gorily killing off holovid heroes in conjunction with the utter beauty of a passing freighter's red position lights, but found himself distracted by the calm insistent way in which one of the participants kept winding a shimmering strip of light grey gauze around his finger, wrapping, unwrapping, wrapping, unwrapping, eyes distant, mouth arguing on autopilot, the crumb of a lime green biscuit balanced on one knee.

Unbound on the young man's shoulder lay the end of a Padawan braid.

Before Qui-Gon could properly rack his brain for the identity of this complete stranger, the parping noise commenced again, dying just as quickly, albeit this time without the attached string of swear-words. Rillikmi was still at the ancient terminal, but he'd grown taller... no, he was sitting on someone's lap, eagerly explaining to said someone, a girl in a short... dress... Depa. Padawan Depa. Explaining to her how to manipulate the computer terminal into making the sounds he was so keen on. And batting away an occasional stray hand. Depa? Frowning into his drink, Qui-Gon watched as Ril wriggled closer to the Padawan until they were very nearly one four-armed and four-legged body perched precariously on the stool, two light brown arms manipulating the keypad on the terminal while two deep orange ones disappeared into the workings of the instrument. Seconds later, all hell broke loose, and went completely unnoticed by any of those present.

Stunned, and in a state of almost physical pain from the combined din, Qui-Gon fought his way out of the room, nearly colliding with a half-undressed Padawan Llipe. 

"Quiiii! I'd been looking for you high and low!" She giggled. "Wouldn't have thought someone as tall as you could so easily hide... go on, spill it. Who've you been inside?"

"Llipe!" Qui-Gon blushed furiously, causing even more amusement in his fellow Padawan. "What on Coruscant is this hellish din your fried is trying to produce, with eager assistance, I might add, from Padawan Billaba?"

Llipe took one step back, blinking a few times as if to bring Qui-Gon back into focus. Her tiny black brows drawn together, she seemed to think intensely for a while, then abruptly grabbed the tall Padawan by his belt and dragged him along behind her. 

"We've forgotten something rather essential, Qui," she squeaked, winding her way through the thick throng of partying life forms in what used to be the kitchen. Qui-Gon could have sworn he recognised faces here and there, but they flickered in and out of vision too fast for him to focus. Damn that drink, he thought faintly, then authoritatively poured it over one of the plants perched on the shelves around the room, earning a quiet giggle from a Calamarian lying underneath it. He absently watched the orange liquid soaking into the creature's thirsty skin, then followed the sharp tug on his wrist. Llipe was getting impatient, it seemed.

"C'mon, old fuzzyhead. Of course you can't truly appreciate the wonders of Ril's late-night sirhorn serenades if you're not in the right state of mind... or body." With nimble fingers, she scooped up the last green biscuit from a tray that was miraculously free of crumbs and lifted it to his lips.

It was Yoda-shaped.

"Llipe!" Qui-Gon took a step back, or attempted to, and found himself poked in the ribs by somebody spiny. He decided it would not be a clever move to turn around and look, seeing as his composure was more than frayed already. "If you're offering me drugs, I must inform you that I have no intention to ingest any whatsoever." He shook his head as if to clear it. "I can't believe you're –"

"Everyone's having them, sweetie," Llipe laughed as she slid the biscuit between Qui-Gon's protesting lips, "including all the good Padawans. Look, it's not like it's anything dangerous. Just a bit of a boost to the senses, that's all. Proven to be completely safe, no side effects, no late reactions... you would trust me, would you?"

"What..." Qui-Gon sputtered as he tried to spit the biscuit out without spraying his blissfully smiling friend with crumbs, then gave in and swallowed, if only for the sake of having his mouth free to talk. "What the hell is that green stuff?"

"Oh, it's called teehace. Force knows where Ril gets it from, but really... half the Temple uses it. Don't tell me you've never come across it? Qui, really... I must work on your education some time."

"Llipe, I-"

Reaching up, she put her small brown hand over his mouth, pushing the last of the biscuit in. "Relax, Qui. This stuff is proven to be much weaker than the concoction Ril offers his guests for a drink, and look how valiantly you put that one away, eh? I swear..." She thought for a while, a cute frown on her face, "...sexual favour of your choice, eh Qui? If you notice anything as much as a hangover. Besides, the stuff is," she hiccuped squeakily, "...all hhhhherbal," accentuating the word with a wriggle of her small body as if to illustrate the concept of the Padawan as a creeping vine, "so no residues. Your precious Master won't notice ennathing in the morning. And now go on and enjoy yourself, Jinn. And that is an order."

She made as if to dance away from him, but Qui-Gon was far from satisfied with her explanation. "Llipe." He grabbed her by the braid, cursing himself inwardly for such rudeness, then remembering that he appeared to be the only one who wasn't currently groping somebody anyway. "What exactly will this do to me?"

The tiny Zabrak giggled. "My, aren't you worried, Jinn-boy. 'snothing much, really. You might not even feel it the first time round. All it does is heighten the senses a bit, you know, make the colours a bit brighter and a bit more... a bit more everywhere." She shrugged her shoulders. "And it makes that din of Ril's one damn sight more attractive." With that, she left a nonplussed Qui-Gon standing in the kitchen, wondering what was going to happen to him.

He hated that feeling of not being in control of his body. Even though strictly speaking, he still was. Closing his eyes, he turned his senses inward, trying to detect the workings of the mystery drug in his system, but could not find anything. Cautiously, he let his senses bleed outward again, half-afraid to admit he was scared of what he might experience.

The scent... no, it was still the same messy mix of incense and food, slightly burnt now that the pots were getting emptier, and with a faint undertone of sweat as the room was hot from the stoves and the close proximity of so many bodies. The noise was still the same – terrible, in fact. Qui-Gon breathed a huge sigh of relief and opened his eyes, only to find the pointy face of a pink-haired girl level with his, about a breath away. She did not flinch, so Qui-Gon did.

She sneered. "Trying not to enjoy yourself, Jedi? Purging the stuff out of your system? I trust that makes Ril's music sound like torture, huh? Pity you've wasted the last of your biccie on Force-shoving it out of you... others could have had sooo much fun with it." She tapped his chest with a long metal smoking implement, but made no move to go away. 

Qui-Gon fidgeted, uneasy despite the fact that she was obviously the deluded one here. "If I may inform you, this Force-shove is largely a myth." He cleared his throat, trying to put a little more confidence in his voice. "We Jedi are just as subject to the limitations of physiology as any other creature, and that includes inebriation –"

"Inebriaaaation!" The girl squealed with mirth. "He said inebriaaay-shun! Someone get this Padawan a drink... or tongs! Tooongs... to get that stick out of his cuuute little arse!" 

Qui-Gon shifted uncomfortably, not sure whether it was just the pink-haired smoking girl's little hand currently poking and stroking his backside. Or maybe a couple more. He flushed intensely, wishing for his enveloping robes, or at least wishing... no, not his robes. He stood out enough as it was, tall as a lighthouse and probably flushed just as bright, pink as the nameless girl's hair as she twined a skinny arm around his waist and drawled into his shoulder, "Let's daaance, Padawwwawn."

Taking a deep breath, Qui-Gon collected all his senses, finding them surprisingly complete, and tried his best to distil a rhythm from the discordant noise Rillikmi's sirhorn was making on top of the computer's monotonous tinkle. Here in the kitchen, the noise level was just about bearable, and maybe dancing was the only way to get some space to himself... if it helps, Qui-Gon thought with an inward shrug, focused for a moment, and let himself sink into the rhythm.


	4. (In which a handful of stoned Padawans discuss the space-time continuum)

"You'd have to ask him yourself, Whane-darling. If he ever gets out of that trance of his again." A whisper, then a giggle as Llipe rubbed one of her pale horns against the pink-haired girl's sweaty neck. "I told you he's hard to keep up with once he gets out of his shell. All I can safely say is I'm sure he's not dating anyone at Temple... and I'm pretty sure he's too strait-laced to seek adventures elsewhere..."

"Adventure... he'd be worth an aaaadventurrrrre...," Whane purred, scraping sweat off the back of her neck with the stem of her pipe. "Look at him... I mean, he..." Her voice trailed off into a murmur as she watched, transfixed like the rest of the room, as the young Jedi danced.

Danced – well, moved anyway, translating the ragged strains of Ril's sirhorn into fiercely proud moves, the strut of a warrior paired with the fluid grace of a flame, throwing himself to the air and floating, eyes closed, no more than a faint sheen of sweat on his proud forehead, liquid elegance as his booted feet spun soundlessly on the stained carpet. 

The kitchen crowd had backed away towards the walls and into the doorways, met eagerly by the people from the other room keen on finding out what was causing everyone else to be so quiet all of a sudden. It was only when Rillikmi himself found himself rudely dumped on the floor as his human cushion Depa joined the ranks of the voyeurs that the music stopped, and Qui-Gon's dance came to a quiet, measured end as he stood in the middle of the kitchen, breathing heavily, and opened his eyes.

And found Whane an inch away from his face. Again.

"My, you are a hot one... if you haven't noticed yet." She wriggled playfully, rubbing her prominent nipples against his chest. "I bet there's a version of this one for... twooo partners, ah?"

Qui-Gon raised his eyebrows, then shook his head. Still sorting through his brain for a polite yet clear reply, he took one step back to try and put some distance between himself and his obviously drunk admirer. That little distance was quite enough to accommodate her hissed words, loud enough for everyone to hear now that the music had stopped.

"Cold fish, huh?"

"Now now now, Whane... be nice to our dear Jedi. Guardians of the peace and all, you know? Besides," Rillikmi grinned wickedly, "he'd be right zonked if he were."

"What-?" Qui-Gon's half-uttered question drowned in uproarious laughter from the crowd, and he wasn't sure whether to be relieved when he found himself flanked by Llipe and Depa and the Padawan with the gauze strip, ready to defend him against the assembled civilians. And Rillikmi was there, reading the unspoken question from Qui-Gon's lips.

"Some species with a certain genetic make-up get really weird side-effects from this stuff, you know? Like, fish... or Wookiees, I'm told... though I've never yet been able to make sense of anything a Wookiee says, whether he's stoned or not!" Uproarious laughter.

Qui-Gon leaned down to whisper into Llipe's ear, "You never told me about this..."

"Qui," she purred, soothingly, "relax. It's perfectly safe for humans. Look at Depa... and she's taken it sooo many times. And Ril, he's human too, and do you see him sprouting a third, sorry second, head? You don't have any fish in your ancestry, do you? There, thought not." She gave Qui-Gon's bottom an affectionate little squeeze before joining the general conversation again.

The gauze-strip boy had launched into a lengthy explanation to one of the room's potted plants. The Calamarian underneath listened intently, as did most of the other bystanders.

"...certain sequence in their codes. Doesn't do anything, you know, not like the people who can't see no red and no green, like, ever..."

"I'll bet you seventwelfty credits that this 'ere Jedi doesn't ever see red, like, ever, either!" somebody crowed from the doorway, much to everyone's amusement. 

Qui-Gon cast a quick glance at the dishevelled figure, then murmured quietly but sharply, "The whites of your eyes are quite crimson enough, thank you very much," causing Llipe and Depa to snort in amusement. All the while, the half-unbraided Padawan was lecturing the potted plant.

"...or like these people who don't see what they see, or not just see it anyway, like they also hear it, and they smell what they hear, and then there's the ones that don't like milk because there's this stray sequence in their genes that tells them they don't do milk, or like the Asss... ass... asunthar, the, they..."

"Wait a tic," Depa interrupted the Padawan's tirade, "you've never met an Asun-Tihaar in your life, Tuinne."

The braided youth stopped short for a moment, as if to assure himself of everyone's, and especially the potted plant's, attention, then continued in a forceful drone, "... but I've heard stories, yes I have, from people who've been there, and they, like, they go see their gods like that, they smoke the stuff and bang, it takes them out of their tiny little minds, y'see because they can't take it, and they go crazy for a week or so and come back talking about fantastic journeys and how they've met their gods and sometimes they come back with bits missing, like, memory, and wounds like they've really been travelling you know. Aaaand it doesn't even take much you know, just a tiny grain up in smoke and they're gone – up in smoke..." He trailed off into giggles, then caught himself, remembering to finish the sentence. "Like, it blurs their focus, and your f-focus..."

"Determine your reality, your focus does!" half a dozen Padawans crowed from all corners of the room, breaking into uncontrolled laughter. Tuinne blinked, then continued unabated.

"Thank you, Masters Yodas... and so as I was saying, the Assunthar... tar... really go out of their mind on teehace, like, travelling into their own version of time, and of space, and they swear stone and bone and... thingy that they've been like on a different planet and, well they've been away because they haven't been home all that time either but you know the Assss... you know them people don't even have space transport of their own... and, and... they don't have no fish either." Satisfied, Tuinne took a deep breath, obviously expecting an answer from the potted plant.

"Llipe... if you'd please excuse me. I'm... feeling a little tired after all this dancing."

"Qui? We haven't managed to scare you, have we, Qui? Look, I doubt you could dance like that if you were in any way susceptible to teehace. In any way other than the way we all are," she added gaily. "Or is Master waiting up for you?" A wink.

"Look, Llipe, I'm just feeling a little sleepy, nothing to do with your mystery drug. I don't sense anything, if that's what you're driving at, and I'm quite glad I'm not. But I'd really rather like to go home now before I fall asleep on your floor... nothing against your floor, but..." he gestured at the assemblage of fruit peel, gift wraps, trumpet flowers, and drunk Calamarian on the carpet, "I'll see you in the morning? And Llipe, it was a wonderful party. Very enlightening."

"I'll see you to the door, Qui. Great of you to come. You need a bit of a change of air sometimes... oh, and shall I tell Whane to write to you?" She winked, and Qui-Gon winced. "All right then. I think she got your message anyway. Force with ya, mate."

"And you." With a last hug, Qui-Gon backed out of Ril's flat, trying to make as little noise on the dark stairs as possible. He seemed to still be in possession of his sense of balance. That was good. 

In truth, he didn't feel anything much, except perhaps a slight drowsiness, and that could easily have been due to the appalling quality of the air inside that room... but something was needling him in the back of his mind, something that drove him home as quickly as his feet would carry him. 

Setting off at a run, Padawan Jinn made for the Jedi Temple. 

*** 

Fingers trembling, he squatted in front of the portable terminal on the floor of his bedroom, hidden behind the bed's high headboard just in case his Master chanced to come in. At four-and-a-half at night, but one never knew. And what he was about to do was not exactly moral.

Not that access to the personal files was in any way restricted – he could get anything he wanted, provided he asked his Master. He would have asked Master Dooku in the morning, and he would have been sure to have his wish granted with that jovial smile... but tomorrow morning was too late. He had to know _now_. Hence his immoral act, behind the headboard. 

Keying in his Master's access code, he waited for the screen to change, then, as quietly as possible, typed his Master's password. Really, it was not his fault he had overheard his Master repeatedly typing a string of characters one day, muttering to himself about passwords and the like, and it was not his fault his eyes and ears had picked up the unmistakable combination of numbers and letters Dooku was most likely to use... and he would never have appropriated his Master's password anyway except in cases of dire need... of which this was one.

Jinn, Qui-Gon. Estimated date of birth. Estimated. Date of arrival at Temple. Circumstances of arrival. Nothing new here – Master had told him all this when he'd asked. You're the best bulk freight ever to have hit the Temple, he was wont to say, and Qui-Gon had come to be proud of that. But now, it was the other information that made him bite his lip, scrolling down the file. Eye colour. Blood group. Midichlorian count. He whistled through his teeth. No wonder they don't tell the Padawans their count. Further down. Test results for various diseases and medical conditions. Negative, negative, negative. Positive. Ah, chafra factor. Inconsequential unless he wanted to have children. Negative, negative, negative. Species. Human, yes he knew that. Subspecies. A link to his genetic chart, chains of letters snipped out of his bloodstream. A text box at the bottom, filled in by a Temple healer, dated three days after his arrival at Coruscant.

Subspecies: Tihaaroth, probably mixed-race.

Qui-Gon drew a deep breath. Tihaar. Asun-Tihaar. Who else was there on that blasted little planet to mix with? Probably mixed-race? Probably? Hells, was he feeling anything or wasn't he? A flash of terror coursed through him, and he forced himself to calm, shutting off the terminal with its small accusing text box. Probably mixed-race.

Never had he wished more fervently for that supposed Jedi ability to purge something out of one's system. Still... he didn't feel anything, did he? Calming his wildly thumping heart, he settled down on the floor to collect his senses. 

No. He didn't feel anything. Nothing beyond the usual, and his grasp on the Force was still there too. He floated the porta-terminal experimentally, and it obeyed his mental command. And all the others had been on the floor laughing from the same dose, and admiring the position lights of the freighters, and adoring Ril's horrid music. And talking to potted plants about the supposed effects of this drug on a race they had never met.

He had. Well, he was one of them, and he didn't feel anything. Surely that was worth more? 

Pleased with his reasoning, Qui-Gon slowly uncurled his legs and began to undress for bed. And besides, he thought, Llipe said something about it not working first time round sometimes. Well, you can be sure I'm not going to give it a second try... I wish I could ask someone to assure me, he thought, but I can't really rouse a Healer at this ungodly hour. Much less my own Master. And surely the stuff must have reached his bloodstream by now, after all he had exerted himself quite a bit, dancing much more than all the others, and they had all been on the floor giggling... he noticed his thoughts were going round in circles and shook his head. No, he didn't sense anything.

Pulling on his sleep pants, Qui-Gon decided that taking a shower now would only awaken his Master. There would be enough time for that in the morning, and he was not entirely sure he wouldn't fall asleep under the spray anyway. At least all that dancing has made me sleepy, he thought fuzzily, as he hit the bed and fell, quite literally fell, asleep.

He was almost sure it was fern tickling his cheek before the soft black velvet enveloped his senses.


	5. (In which the ground misbehaves, and reality fails to go away)

Qui-Gon awoke quite a while before his mind actually noticed – an ache, there was an achy shoulder from lying in one place, in one position too long... Groaning, he burrowed deeper into the covers, trying to get back to sleep, back to that soft red glow behind his closed lids that told him it was daylight outside, and it would be green as always when he opened them, and cold...

Something dripped, and Qui-Gon twitched and pulled the covers tighter around himself.

Something else dripped, and then another something. Cool pinpricks of sensation, insistent. Water... the bed was damp? Fuzzily, Qui-Gon opened his eyes.

Daylight was green.

Green and... veined. Struggling to focus as the green daylight burned into his eye sockets and sliced through his brain, Qui-Gon tried to raise his head. A cold green hand slapped him in the face, wetly and with a strange gentleness. The Padawan blinked, trying to get some of that cool moisture into his dry eyes. Fingers, flat fingers... leaves. Nodding feather-like leaves. Fern, tall as all heaven. The fern was the sky, and the sky was green, a murky translucent green from which rain was falling in occasional cool drops. 

Qui-Gon shook his head, trying to dispel the repetitive images of green veins, tarnished daylight and nodding fern. Surely he must be dreaming... but surely dreams weren't meant to be this... well, wet.

He opened his eyes again. The fern had most definitely not gone away, and neither had the crippling headache that had arrived with the daylight. I should go back to sleep, he thought, I am dreaming. 

Forlornly, he looked down at his brown leggings, the only thing he was wearing, stained almost black where the raindrops had hit, spreading islands of cool black... 

It was a while before he remembered to think again. What was I thinking, he thought. Thinking... hard. Ah, sleep. Of course. Too real for a dream, even though it couldn't be... but too wet to sleep in, even in a dream. There must be... dry place.

Sighing, Qui-Gon surveyed his slack legs in their slowly darkening leggings. Walk, wasn't that what they were for? Stand, maybe? His head hurt unbelievably. I will get Llipe for this, some little voice in his head said, while the rest of him was trying to remember what Llipe was and why it would be a good thing to get. 

Stand.

Those legs felt like old wood, old wood was a good idea, a tree maybe to hide under... so heavy. This... this me-thing can balance? And what is that taste in my mouth? Struggling against the thick cumbersome weight of his own legs while trying to hold his head together with his hands, Qui-Gon pushed himself up, through the cover of fern, into... 

Wet. Brown. Flat. No, he had fallen... hadn't he? Closing his eyes, Qui-Gon tried to sort his senses. Something was pounding behind his eyes, in a highly irregular rhythm, mocking him. Sleep? With this din going on? They were cries, quiet little titters and loud squawks that sounded like they were directly above him... if the wet part was below him. Breathe, he thought desperately, breathe. Shut it all out. There is you. There is gravity, and moisture and light. Light can stay away for the time being. There is headache, so there is head. There is sound. Focus on sound. Uneven carpet of song... bird, animal noises. There is smell of thick earth and rotting fern. There is that below. And there is... above. 

Keeping his eyes closed, he pulled his legs up, then rolled to his knees. Steady. There is quite a lot of 'up' here. Sway. Birdsong in and out of focus. Nausea, don't faint, not now. Focus on the cold at his fingertips. Crawl. Crawl under the fern, hide. What was that thought he'd had? Oh, back to sleep. That was it. Sleep. Crawl into the fern. Crawl under... eyes closed, focus on fingertips, wet, cold, earth. Into.

Out – out of ground, scream, own voice tasting dirty, headlong, headfirst, down. Fall. I've fallen. Sith it's dark, it's... maybe asleep?

Blackout.

***  
It was voices that woke him, and voices were good. He remembered voices. Llipe was a voice, and a face, and it was faces he saw in his mind's eye. Good. The light on the inside of his eyes was still red, but the rain had abated, and the warmth of his bed was back... no more raindrops. Wrapped tightly in sheets, harsh starched sheets that chafed, and voices were there too, voices... 

He would get up soon. What were all these people doing in his bedroom? Talking, shouting. Trying to throw him out of bed, rocking him, tugging. He reached out to bat them away, there where the voices were coming from, and found his body did not obey him.

His eyes snapped open, followed by a dagger of pale light and a groan, his own. 

He saw sky, fern and jerking sky as he tumbled upwards towards the voices, away from the earth, the earth he could see now, and the voices he could hear now, and they were not birdsong. And he wasn't going to try and rise again, not after last time, and still he found himself rising up and up and towards the ground, more ground, higher this time, oh yes he had fallen. A pit, his mind supplied, and a net. That was why the rest of his body wasn't moving. It was... around him and up, and everywhere.

...rerehanawhiritarangauputitikohanetanekehawaringakoatangatatangatatangata...

The voices were not birdsong, though they could have been, chattering rough voices, excited, syllables raining down on his ears and he stared at them for a while before staring at the faces.

They were staring back at him, and they were still staring inside him as the ground kissed him roughly and he felt himself dragged along, in the rough embrace of that net, those voices in his head, earth under his head, stone, merciful thud that took away the headache...

Faces, dark fern-veined faces behind his eyelids as he fell again, into darker darkness.

*** 

The ground was much clearer the next time he awoke, much smoother and more plain to see. It was quieter too. And his head hurt less, though he decided to keep his eyes closed for the time being. Body, he had to take stock of his body. It was still not a bed he was in... but this was his body all right, his legs stretched out easily on the floor, his stomach he was lying on, his braid tickling the side of his neck, still wet. These were his arms... this was not his... cutting into his upper arms, pulling his shoulders back. Damn. But only there. One bond to hold him? It made no sense... he moved his legs experimentally, and yes, they moved. 

Rolling on to his side clumsily, he tried to sit up – and immediately had what felt suspiciously like a sharp stick against his throat. At the other end of the stick was a face, a very real face, and one of these voices... so they had been real. Qui-Gon bit his lip, trying to focus. The face was human, dark and marked all over with severe cuts and swirls of black. A pair of dark eyes glittered at him and a harsh voice spoke in clipped syllables, like a rivulet of speech tripping over pebbles, stopping every time Qui-Gon had reminded himself that this was a language he should make an effort at understanding.

As it was, the spear spoke clearly enough. If indeed it was a spear. Qui-Gon dared not look down at the bit closest to his neck, but trusted his senses as far as the sharpness was concerned. The shaft was long and somewhat ornate at the other end, matching the markings on the young man's face. He was scowling, wide-eyed, had stopped speaking now. Fearful, maybe? Qui-Gon reached out, out beyond his mind – the Force, that was it... and had to clench all his muscles to keep from falling forward into that spear-point...

His inner hand slipped through fog, and landed on wet ground, as his body had done only a while ago. The Force was elsewhere, behind, beyond the fern... not here. Here was the voice, and the spear-point, and the single bond cutting into his upper arms, and the silhouette of another man against a rectangle of light. A door. He was in a house, and judging from the impatient gesture the armed man was making with his head, he was to leave the house as quickly as possible.

Staggering, Qui-Gon rose to his feet, taking a step back to avoid the weapon still pointed at him, collecting his senses, or what was left of them. Well, standing worked. Going back to sleep probably wouldn't. The hand on his shoulder felt very real, urging him forward towards the other man silhouetted against the bright light.

The man brought darkness, but not the velvet darkness of sleep. It was a very real blindfold that settled over Qui-Gon's eyes and was knotted tightly with a few curt words. The spear-point was nowhere to be seen, and the hand took over, clasping one of his bound arms and urging him to go, in the unmistakable language of the body. 

Daylight didn't touch him, but walk he could. He wasn't sure whether to call that an improvement yet... but whoever they were, they were apparently not too keen on eating him, and they... well, they spoke. Not anything he could make sense of, but they were speaking, clothed, armed humans. That was a start. Of course things would be easier if he had... some weapon, or some of his... Force sense... but this was beginning to look more like the sort of dream he would survive. If indeed it was – 

He felt himself abruptly pushed to his knees. The voice of the man with the spear spoke up again, softly, the rivulet of syllables now rhythmical, almost singing. And it wasn't speaking to him. The answer came in the slow measured tones of a deep male voice, slightly cracked, roughened but full. And it sounded like it came from very far above.

The other voices again, quiet, more like birdsong again now. Taking their leave in flight. Where the other voices were like agitated birds, that new voice was... no, earthquakes didn't have voices. But something like that anyway. Something ancient, and smouldering, and heavy with threat, anticipation and power. If only I could understand what he's saying, Qui-Gon thought helplessly. If only I could see the face, to read it at least. Read why I am here, and if I am here at all. 

Taking a deep breath and tilting his blindfolded face up, Qui-Gon opened his mouth to speak to the invisible man. His words died on his tongue, breath forgotten.

The hard warm hand grabbing his chin felt real. _Very_ real.


	6. (In which Qui-Gon attempts to drown on dry land)

I wish I could at least see him, Qui-Gon thought miserably. Must be a big man... the hand on my chin feels massive...

Knees spread wide on the uneven hard floor, he tried his best to stay upright as the man slowly and deliberately tilted Qui-Gon's face upwards until his neck was straining, hands curled into fists behind his back, his whole body taut as a bowstring, thighs trembling, trying to keep himself upright while the hard warm hand slid a little higher, releasing his chin to rub against his lips, pulling the tender flesh this way and that as if seeking something. A thick finger invaded his mouth, then a second, and the hand kept pushing back, kept him bent backwards, throat exposed, mouth full of the earthy salty flavour of the man's skin. Qui-Gon swallowed noisily, desperately trying not to bite down.

The fingers withdrew. A quiet noise that could have been a snort, could have been a chuckle. If only he could see the man's face. Slowly, he let his head drop to his chest again, anticipating the next assault, listening for the man's breaths. Slow, heavy, measured breaths barely audible over the rush of his own blood in his ears, half-covered as they were by the blindfold.

A hard, punishing grip on his upper arm, and he couldn't help the surprised whimper that escaped his mouth. The hand gripped him stronger, squeezing the youth's slender arm, making the thin thread cut more deeply into his flesh where his arms were bound behind him. Painful, this was bruising strength, and Qui-Gon bit his lip reining in a grunt of pain, drawing a shaky deep breath, bracing himself for being yanked upright or tossed to the ground. Like a piece of flesh, he thought, he's assessing me like some animal, teeth, muscles, suppleness...

He did yelp in surprise when he felt his pants being tugged down roughly, the abused string breaking and leaving him rudely exposed, fabric pooling around his knees. He turned his head, as if averting his eyes would help, as if those eyes would help at all. As if he knew whose gaze he was trying to avoid, and where that gaze was. His head swam, and his mouth was dry and still full of the taste of the strange man and he wished desperately for a touch of the Force, not the damp misty distance he had felt the last time he had opened himself and nearly fallen... if he had the Force, he could maybe see a little, read a little of that man that was all roughness and strength, and absence and calm, maddening calm, slow and thoughtful in his humiliation... distant...

Casting his aching mind out into the fog, Qui-Gon reeled at the undertow that took hold of him, dragging him away from himself, fast, thirsty and floating, needing... he gasped as he fell forward, wincing as a hand fisted in his short hair, keeping him upright while the other tore the blindfold off, then settled around his throat, hard and possessive, forcing him to look up, up into the face of his captor.

The man was huge.

Not just in size – although he was easily Qui-Gon's height, and massively built at that. The sheer bruising strength in those hands was easily believable at the sight of the wide chest and the broad muscular shoulders barely covered by a cloak of some sort that hung haphazardly down to the man's knees, framing his dark bronze skin in thin wispy feathers of an even darker brown.

His hair was long, tangled in the feathers of the cloak at the tips, thick and ragged, dirty black, greying and unkempt, spilling over the shoulders, framing the proud column of his neck. Part of it was gathered in a knot at the top of his head, held there by some kind of wooden ornament. Or by tangles and time.

Tangles and time. The man's face was lined, but not by age. Lined by artful scars swirling and snaking over his skin, shallow black grooves where the thin daylight caught in them, spirals eddying across his cheeks, trailing off into elegant harsh lines surrounding his mouth, a pair of perfectly black lips curled into the faintest sneer of disgust. Or were they? The face was so hard to read under all that... writing, I suppose it's writing, Qui-Gon thought helplessly. Carving, even. A perfectly symmetrical frown echoing thick dark eyebrows and furrowing the wide forehead in hard black lines, accentuating the long nose, nostrils flared under smaller spirals, no square inch of skin uncovered by the tangled webwork of tattoo, jagged curls of ornamental scarring flowing into jagged curls of greying hair framing the face, the cruel symphony of black and brown broken only by the long polished shape of a pale green stone pendant hanging from one ear.

And by the man's eyes.

Almost small, under the thick brows, and bright amid the savaged skin. And blue, a cool greyish blue totally out of touch with the rest of the man's face. Eyes that were... Qui-Gon fidgeted as if to steady himself, only to be reminded that his hair and throat were in the firm grip of hands he had almost forgotten about. The yearning was there again, the elusive current of the Force, the thirst for a sea that was these eyes, and the wish for a drop of the cool blue water, for a deep draught of the Living Force. His mouth was so dry... and this man was so water and yet so far... he swallowed against the tightness in his throat, his aching mind casting about for something to read in those eyes, longing to sink, to fall, to swim, and before he knew it the words were spilling from his lips, a low desperate stream of yearning, voice breaking the dam that tears would not...

He saw the scarred face distantly but did not hear the words the black mouth formed. Helpless, he watched the symmetrical frown deepen and the growl of the man's voice rise, and still he could not stop himself, mindless words of longing and stomach-curling need, of trying to will the sea in those eyes to slake the thirst he felt, of trying to will the Force to make him whole, to make him understand, to make him wake.

A hard hand clamped his mouth shut, and then he was upon him with all his weight and brute strength, flinging the struggling boy to the ground, covering him, possessing him, enveloping him in the heavy earthy smell that was so unlike the glassy sea he thought he craved, but so good nevertheless, so near, so –

Qui-Gon reared up, horrified. Dreaming, you must be dreaming... the after-effects... this cannot be happening... cannot want this to be happening... want the hard body covering you, struggling fruitlessly, want the hand holding my mouth, my face in his hand, holding hard, the more I struggle the harder he holds and his voice gets darker like a stormy sea all those rolling words full of wind and dizziness and... Force, I want out, and I want in, to dive in deeper... hand... that hand... there... aaah...

The young pale body squirmed on the ground, pinned down by the older man's sheer physical strength. One large bronzed hand covered the captive's mouth, muffling the ever more urgent sobs and cries, while the other squeezed the hardening cock roughly, bringing it to a deep pink matching the shameful excited blush on the boy's cheeks. Qui-Gon twisted in his captor's rough grip, desperate to get out, desperate for more, more of he knew not what, helpless to escape or even to scream as he felt the roughness of the big man's kilt give way to insistent hardness stabbing the small of his back, the heat of friction unbearable, so tight, so cruel and close, that rumbling cracked voice spilling fractured words over his struggling body, deep guttural laughter at the blushing shameful craving that mounted with each thrust, his cock being jerked and pulled by a rough hand in time with the hard thrusts as the other man's throbbing hardness raked along the crease between his buttocks, pumping, taking, possessing, spilling thick liquid heat between their burning bodies, spilling a thick harsh roar from the black lips...

Leaving Qui-Gon on the ground, shattered, stained, craving. Leaving him still unsatisfied, needing, needing a touch, needing a shake of his head to clear his mind... needing a word.

Words he got. A harsh growl of speech over the small rustle of the big man straightening his kilt and cloak. Curt words, syllables rolling around his ears like waves while he lay on the dry ground gasping for breath. The hand in his hair again, pulling him up, the thick finger rubbing against his lips. Oh Force he smells of me now, Qui-Gon thought, head spinning, head dropping to the hard floor as the hands let go and the words never stopped, the angry rumble of that sea-deep voice that just went on and on until it ran aground in a frustrated grunt.

Dirty toes nudged the prone boy's bound arms. The man shook his head and left.

Qui-Gon could no longer tell what the taste of salt on his lips was.


	7. (In which Qui-Gon acquires a new name)

He wasn't entirely sure what he had been expecting the first time he was allowed to set foot outside the house again. He had tried his best to wipe the dirt and tears off his face, he had even tried to belt his badly abused leggings with what was left of the thin strand of rope he had been bound with, but had found it too short for the purpose. Holding them up by the waistband with one hand, running the other through his short hair as if to rake out the last lingering traces of headache, Qui-Gon blinked into daylight.

Daylight blinked back.

Eyes, pairs of large, curious brown eyes blinked up at him from under tiny brows knit in a frown of concentration or raised in speechless amazement. Before he knew it, he was the centre of a ring of children of various ages and in various states of undress, gazing, staring, murmuring, whispering and nudging each other while jostling to stay at a respectable distance lest the stranger lash out at them with whatever outlandish appendages or weapons he might have. The smallest of the children hid behind the kilts of their elder siblings, peeking out occasionally to make sure nobody had been eaten yet. The older boys and girls just stared, gesturing and whispering at each other as if to give the impression they had seen all this before... all this... bone-white man. And the funny plain cloth covering him, and look, he was holding it up with his hand as if he had never seen a belt in his life. And the funny braid, have you seen the braid, it's not around his neck, it goes all the way down his chest, and it's made of his hair, isn't it? His face is so pale, so big like a man's and yet so empty, and he's got eyes like the ariki, pale blue eyes, just like Te-... shut up, silly. Can't you see he's a poor plainface – to compare him to the chief in any respect, honestly...

The voices got a little bolder with the arrival of the women, and knowing that their mothers were guarding their backs, some of the boys got bolder, pointing fingers, inching closer, never taking their eyes off the tall pale stranger. Qui-Gon attempted a smile, and the murmur of strange voices died down as if he'd dropped a bomb. Taking a deep breath, he extended his smile to all assembled, then raised his free hand to his chest, resting it there.

"Jinn."

Incredulous eyes at the sound of his voice. Tiny rows of teeth bared in an attempt to recreate the sound, questioning looks in the direction of the mothers, the murmur of voices rising again. Qui-Gon forced another smile, grateful that he had not attempted to give his full name, and repeated, quietly, "Jinn."

"Hine!!" piped up a small voice, crowing with delight, "ko Hine!", and within seconds the whole gathering broke into laughter, pointing and giggling, the older children nodding benignly at the originator of what Qui-Gon surmised was his new nickname, and a very funny one at that. The little boy gloried in his invention, chanting 'Hine, Hine' and grinning at Qui-Gon. The grin was savage though, and his eyes weren't laughing along with his mouth. Qui-Gon felt slightly uneasy but decided to bear it gracefully, at least until he'd get a chance to find out what the name meant. For now, it would have to do as an approximation at 'Jinn'... and frankly, after the events of the morning he was glad they were willing to call him anything.

Not that the owner of the heavy hand falling on his shoulder did. 

*** 

They didn't have to call him anything, nor even speak to him. They set him to labour at tasks so plain and simple they required no words, only the strength and stubbornness of an animal. An animal, Qui-Gon thought as he beat the roots of a red-skinned yellowish tuber into a pulp with a stone pestle, that is all they see me for. And having witnessed the hardening of the spear points in the fires, and the skinning of the quarry, he had little doubt they would hunt him down like one if he tried to escape. 

Never once did they let him out of their sight, especially not now that he had a heavy stone in his hands. The old man sitting wrapped in his cloak, leaning against the side of the hut, had an elaborate axe to his name, and even through the tangle of his facial tattoo he looked quite fierce enough to use it, should the slave make the slightest attempt at disobedience. 

Oh, he could have run, probably. Could have run at some point while digging the cooking-pit, could have run while hefting the rocks on top of the fireplace, could certainly have run while picking the large flat leaves they had sent him in search of, always within sight of the rest of the party, but what did that mean in a forest as dense as the one that surrounded the village... yes, he could have run.

But where to? He had nothing but his leggings to his name, and while his strength and skill would probably enable him to survive in the savage forest, he still hadn't got the faintest inkling of where he was. Or how he had got here. He remembered bits, shards of clear memory in the fog that was his past. His name for one thing. The Force, though what it was supposed to do eluded him. As it was, it didn't do anything useful... and he resolutely refused to think of how it had let him down, dragged him under and left him gasping on the shore, kicked and shouted at by the barbarian who claimed him as his property. No, best not to think of him. What he had seen in the man's eyes... no, it was wrong. Best not to think of him.

Best to keep his eyes and ears open, to try and gather information on where and what this place was, to try and make a start at understanding the language the people were speaking, even though hardly any of it was ever directed at him. They addressed him with little slaps and tugs, like a stubborn animal, dragging him along by an arm and setting him to work by showing him what he was supposed to do and swatting him on the back to make him start. 

They had become quite taken with the way his skin coloured when beaten, marvelling at the thin red chafe mark the bonds had made on his upper arms and at the bruises the chief had left when he had grabbed him, the imprints of the man's rude fingers slowly fading from purple to yellow. Yet although they admired the strangeness of his skin and general physical appearance, there was nothing of admiration in their demeanour. Not disgust either, not exactly... it was more like indifference, as if he was of no consequence at all, something to be used and discarded at will. Only the children seemed to treat him as their special pet, occasionally sneaking away from their parents' watchful gaze to steal one from the pile of reddish tuber roots and make the big pale man come after them, knowing full well he would not dare do them any harm. Or they would creep close while he was labouring away, to get a sneaky feel of the unfamiliar fabric of his leggings, soft and stained, or of his skin, soft and stained, skin that was the colour of fresh bones and darkened to a dirty purple where the ariki's hands had touched him.

He could see the little girl out of the corner of his eyes right now, pleased with how his senses were improving again. Not that his present task was in any way enough to occupy his mind, however fogged parts of it may still be. If anything, the sight of a fern-stalk the size of a small child creeping along the little path that led up to the house would have been enough to arouse suspicion. She probably thought she was quite well-camouflaged, the ruddy colour of her short kilt melting into the dead leaves at the bottom of the fern, the wide green completely hiding her upper body while allowing her to peek through the feathery leaves. After all, how was the stupid slave supposed to know ferns did not come with little brown legs at the bottom?

"E Hine!" The little giggle had of course given her away long before Qui-Gon could make a creditable effort at appearing surprised, but he did his best anyway, dropping the stone pestle into the mush, sending mashed root splashing on his knees and on her feet as she stood looming over him. With an imperious expression on her small face, she motioned for him to crouch down, and Qui-Gon acquiesced, continuing to pound at the roots lest the watchful old man should think he was neglecting his duties.

He heard the rip of the fern being stripped of its green by a determined little hand, then felt the little feathery leaves raining down on his bent back as the girl singsonged a few words in what sounded like a pleased, awed tone. Green, Qui-Gon thought, green is probably the only colour they haven't seen on my skin yet. The girl seemed satisfied, judging from the earnest look on her face as she brushed the leaves off his back, leaving it as pristine and bone-white as it had been. 

He had turned back to his work and missed her second of thoughtful consideration of the bare fern-stalk. It caught him completely by surprise as it came down on his back, the flexible tip curling around his ribs and leaving a deep pink mark. The girl cooed in delight, running small fingers over the stinging skin, feeling the redness and warmth, like a tiny ornament of fire. Proud of her discovery, she took a deep breath, then a step back, and launched back into her little song.

The song did not end until the fern-stalk broke in two and the little one lost interest, having turned the pale man's back into a satisfyingly decorated area. Giggling, she ran for the house to pick up her well-deserved praise from the old man with the axe. 

Qui-Gon did not look, head bent to his work. He had no desire for an even deeper shade of red to be inflicted on his skin at this point in time.


	8. (In which another plainface explains nothing)

In a way, the days inside the house were better, and yet worse, Qui-Gon mused. Better because the work involved was less hard, and the children wouldn't dare come in and taunt him in the sanctuary of the chief's house. Better because the big man would actually remember to feed him now and then, or to have food dropped off at the house when he was away. Better because sitting cross-legged on the floor mending a feathered cloak was a better way to keep warm than crouching on the wet grass of some clearing scraping the dirt off fern roots with his fingernails.

And yet worse. The chief did not call him 'Hine'. He did not call him anything, had never even made an attempt at revealing his own name. He commanded Qui-Gon with his hands, strong callused hands touching him unashamedly, wrapping around his wrists and guiding his slave's hands to their task. His slave, that was what he was in the days inside the house, more and more frequent these days. His... body slave. And Qui-Gon did not even want to think about how that made him feel.

The feathers on the cloak were ragged and brown, thin wispy stringy affairs that must have looked quite unimpressive on whichever bird had originally sported them. Near the top, the thick cover of hairy brown feathers was offset against a wide strip of dirty green ones, rather more feather-like in appearance, shimmering faintly and possessed of a thick wad of white down at the bottom, there where each feather disappeared under the next one, creating a pocket of hidden softness under the unappealing exterior. He had seen finer cloaks than this one, woven with red threads in elaborate patterns, or decorated with wide fringes of thin black twine, or embroidered in a bold pattern of white and pale purple squares picked out in feather tips. All finer and more worthy of a chief than the one currently draped over his knees as he fiddled with threading the length of flax through the holes in the frayed hem. 

And yet the man would rather go out cloakless, in just his kilt and his thick hair warming his shoulders, than wear any cloak but this one, almost as if it meant something more to him than a large square of woven flax, softened with age and wear and embellished with a thick covering of dirt-brown feathers, rugged and savage like the man himself. And warm.

No. The feathers were warm, the cloak was, making his task of mending a very comfortable one... the man was not. Not warm. Unbidden, Qui-Gon's thoughts strayed to the chief's hands, large callused paws hard as iron and yet... warm. He has a fire in him, must have, how else would he go without a cloak in the grey early-autumn drizzle. All right, so he was warm, his body was at least. But these feathers were soft, and he was not, he was hard and rude and untouchable, not soft and gentle like these feathers he so liked to wear.

Untouchable. Qui-Gon wished this were so. In fact, he was mighty touchable, and demanded to be touched on a regular basis. Tending the man's hair was all right really (though yes, the thick greying mane was indeed soft as the feathers), and he allowed himself the small delight of burying his hands in the tangled strands, working them into a dark shiny mass with the aid of patience and oil, tying off the topknot and affixing the plain wooden comb he always wore. No, doing the hair was fine, almost a meditation. The beard was worse.

Because, you see, the chief had no beard, or at least no desire to have one, judging from the impatient way in which he had motioned for his inexperienced body slave to commence pulling out the individual hairs on his cheeks and chin by the root, with the aid of a pair of remarkably sharp mussel shells. It wasn't that he feared giving his master pain – after all, he had asked for it, and did not wince in the slightest at the laborious procedure. It was the closeness that bothered him more than anything here. And he had to get close, really close, to see the black hairs against the black-blue-tinted skin of the tattoo. He had given up in the end and resorted to feeling his way, running his fingertips over the spiral-scarred landscape of the big man's face, feeling for resistance. He had got to know the face intimately that way, scoped out the tiny asymmetries in the scrollwork low on each cheek, found to his amazement that the finer the web of tinted scars the less hair would grow on them. And that the man's lips, in all their savage blue-black glory, were full and quite... soft.

In moments like that he was earnestly afraid for his sanity, as if the desperate unslakeable thirst he had felt when he had first opened himself to the man's Force aura could wash over him again any minute, this time to destroy him completely, break him and leave him shattered on the floor, at a mere blink from the strange horrid man who owned him. 

He tried his best to avoid the man's eyes at least, uncertain of when it would be safe to look into these incongruous grey-blue depths without being overtaken by a yearning that was stronger than he was, a yearning that had nothing to do with his will and everything to do with a need he could neither explain nor fulfil. Thinking back to the last time still made him feel faintly sick, and he truly did not know what the man would be capable of doing the next time. There had better not be a next time. Not until I've got this Force under control, he thought, helplessly.

That was why he preferred attending to the man's hair. No eye contact. No need to run his fingertips over the elaborately scarred face in what must not be a caress, only because he couldn't see the bloody stubble against the tattooed skin. Not that it was the man's only tattoo, far from it. He'd seen his thighs through the loose strands of the kilt, the bronzed skin almost entirely blackened by artful cutwork, leaving his natural skin colour as an ornament, elongated triangles and curls like budding fern leaves. To the unsuspecting observer, he would have appeared to be wearing rather tight embroidered shorts, Qui-Gon thought. 

All that skin, and the aching memory of how terrifyingly good it had felt rubbing against his, before it had all gone to ground hard and painful and he'd been left alone with his need, a need that went so much deeper than the mere physical abuse. No, he did not want to relive this. Not until he had a clearer mind, and the Force was back with him. And when he would tentatively reach out the next time, it would most definitely not be to this man...

He dreaded the day the chief would demand a massage. 

And he was torn between relief and an inexplicable, annoying sense of loss every time he was sent outside.

*** 

He would usually be sent outside when Ketoa came. Ketoa, if that was his name, at least it was the word that the big man greeted him with, enthusiastically. He had never seen nor been given any idea of what it was that Ketoa came for, but from the two men's demeanour afterwards it was perfectly believable that Ketoa shared the greying chief's bed. Based on that suspicion, Qui-Gon had once endeavoured to sneak past the master's house during one of these afternoons when he was banned from it. He had come to listen for lustful grunts and moans... and thinking back, he _had_ heard them. Moans, deep growls, little helpless cries of pleasure in what would have been Ketoa's voice... if he remembered correctly. The sheer outburst of Force had sent him reeling and running for the woods, clutching his head. No, it was not time for that yet, not yet...

Seen with a sober eye, Ketoa was quite unlike his lover. About twenty years younger for a start, perhaps a few years older than Qui-Gon himself, it was hard to tell from the man's compact elegant physique. Slender but strong, his cloak decorated with wide bands of decorative weaving and featherwork, his bearing proud, almost arrogant. He looked just as regal as the chief himself, for all that he was almost a foot shorter. And his face was pure as the dark washed river sands, smooth skin touched only by a pair of birthmarks, small dark spots, one in the middle of his forehead, the other high on his right cheekbone. Only a small shallowly-cut swirl of tattoo rested gracefully above his right eyebrow, tapering to two points that seemed to anchor it to the twin birthmarks. Other than that, his skin was smooth and unmarked, the chin with its small cleft aristocratic and elegant, his lips a soft bronze, pouting in that expression of faint disgust that the other men achieved by tattooing. His eyes were of the darkest brown, very clear and sharp, narrowed under sweeping brows black as his short-cropped hair. The man was beautiful in the most disconcerting way possible, and positively radiated superiority and arrogance. He had never once called him 'Hine', or indeed touched him. He had cast his hand in Qui-Gon's general direction while talking to the chief, never even sparing the slave a glance. The word that had accompanied the careless gesture had sounded like 'mokai', and whatever that meant, it was probably not a term of endearment. 

And yet Ketoa was held in high esteem by all and sundry when he walked about the village, whether in the company of his regal lover or on his own. Women would greet him with choicest friendliness, asking his opinion on some piece of handiwork, men would nod their heads at him slowly in deference and get up from their seats to speak with him in quiet earnest voices. He was probably the only person in the village, except for the imposing chief himself, who was immune to the children's playful teasing. For all his barely decorated face and apparent haughtiness, Ketoa was evidently treated with awe by everybody.

And Qui-Gon would soon find out why.


	9. (In which green sludge makes an impression, and red blood does not)

Qui-Gon wasn't sure whether to be pleased or frustrated. The green goo at the bottom of the cooking pit he was supposed to clean out put him in mind of something... or of someone, to be precise. It didn't make any sense, but it felt desperately right, like a memory trying to push to the surface. Sighing, he sank his hands into the overcooked green vegetable residue that had gathered underneath the layer of stones. Best not to think. Not that he was avoiding it, but... in general, it had been the best method so far to not think in the direction you desperately wanted to think in, like 'how did I get here', or 'what's wrong with my mind for Force's sake'. Much better to focus on the here and now, on what was at hand, and be mindful of the little splinters of memory that would get tangled in the random threads of thought while you weren't looking.

It wasn't much. He'd remembered his clothing, and what it had been for when he still had it, and that being without it was... funny. Well, he remembered people giggling anyway, friendly as far as he could tell. He remembered being one of many, many that were the same, always in a sea of faces. And now the slushy green leaves reminded him of someone as well. He filed the memory away, hoping it would come to something eventually. Hoping it would come to enough of a something to form an image of where he belonged. And he really hoped there would be such a place. He did not want to belong here. 

Not here, in the possession of a man who was capable of giving him sheer agony with a Force aura he could unleash seemingly at will. Well, maybe not at will... it seemed to be stronger whenever he was with his lover. Or... that first time they had met. Qui-Gon swallowed. It still hurt to think back to how powerless he had been. How utterly incapable of getting through. How needy. It stung, with every day that brought back more memories. Damn, he should be capable of dealing with this, capable of _using_ this Force, not letting himself be used... he shook his head, angrily. He wasn't being used. He was being ignored, most of the time, and he could not honestly say whether that was all that much better. 

Dropping the putrid green mass into a waiting calabash, Qui-Gon straightened his back and allowed himself a glance around. He still had no sense of the man – he could be anywhere. He could come leaping out of the underbrush for all he knew, to grab him by the wrist and drag him to his next place of labour. Or into the house. He wasn't in the house at the moment, he had overseen the big man getting dressed and perfunctorily combing his hair with those big clumsy fingers of his. From where Qui-Gon was standing, ankle-deep in a three-foot-deep pit sticky with wet ashes and loam and food residue, he could not see where the big chief had gone. He had gone away, that was what mattered for the moment.

I should try and reach out to the Force again, he thought bleakly. Pray he is at the other end of the village. 

Staring down at his mucky hands, Qui-Gon tried to will his thoughts away from the hands of his owner and from the acute sensation of how they felt grabbing his wrists. Not here, not now. I don't even like men, he thought desperately, I don't _want_ him in my mind. I don't want him. Then why can't I stop thinking about him? As if he was the only thing that was real in this place. 

Grabbing one hand with the other, he felt the slick coolness of the greenish dirt on his skin. This is real, he reminded himself, this muck is real. Reach out to the Force and keep your thoughts on this stupid stinking muck. Taking a deep breath, Qui-Gon let the armour around his mind thin a little, staring intently at the calabash full of muck. Think Force, he thought muzzily, think strength, flowing through you, out and down to this dead... thing. Oh, and it flowed, like tiny droplets of water down a sun-dried rock. So good...

Qui-Gon almost fell over backwards into the pit. The calabash was floating several inches above the ground, tipping precariously. He caught it in his hands and set it down carefully, hardly daring to breathe for fear of letting out an all-too conspicuous whimper of joy. It was coming back to him! He grinned insanely at the green goo in the calabash, thanking the nameless green person it had reminded him of. It was.. the Force was coming back to him. He would be able to... what? To drink from the slow trickle of Force to assuage his raging thirst. To make life a lot easier for him for a start, maybe to understand, and then... to fight back his owner's mental assaults? To... hells, what do you do with a man who is water when you're no longer thirsty? What do you do with the sea when you have a spring? 

You swim, said a small voice in the back of his head.

*** 

Still elated from his discovery and feeling a whole foot taller and more powerful despite his ragged appearance, Qui-Gon dumped the calabash full of muck in the forest, grinning at the little green pile of stinking stuff. If he made good headway like this, maybe floating the odd handful of gunk out of the pit instead of having to bend his back every single time, he might get round to having a go at his master's plucking-shells before he returned. Surely the man was not expecting his slave to be naturally beardless, and Qui-Gon was decidedly too old to not have a faint blue shadow on his jaw in the morning. A shadow which had deepened into the tactile region recently, and the pair of shells looked sharp-edged enough to allow him to get rid of at least the worst of the new bristles on his face without having to pull them all out individually. 

Still elated and feeling rather overconfident, Qui-Gon redoubled his efforts at getting the cooking pit clean as quickly as possible. Very soon, he would not have to be afraid of that big savage of a man any more. Not afraid of the touch of his hands or the look in those eyes. Not afraid of the brute strength in that body, and the blackened lips...

Why was he still thinking of him? Shaking his head, Qui-Gon picked up the last batch of gunk he'd managed to scrape out of the pit. It was pristine now as far as he could see, down to the thick wet earth. Take that to the forest's edge, and then maybe go for a stroll around if master's not looking... what was that noise?

There was chanting. Motley voices singing a low and narrow tune. On the other side of the house? As quietly as possible, Qui-Gon disposed of his last load and crept around the corner of the house towards the public part of the yard. The feeling at the sight of his master was no longer one of dread, he was pleased to notice. No roiling in his stomach any more, and hardly any headache. The slight curling of something in his lower abdomen was probably relief – anyway, it was good. But his master was far from alone. 

He was standing with his back to Qui-Gon, wrapped in his favourite cloak, hair streaming over his shoulders. It looks greyer in daylight, he caught himself thinking. The chief's attention was focused on the young man walking towards him slowly, almost reluctantly. Not quite as tall as the master, and a little stocky, with a face as broad and regal as the man himself. Only it was perfectly smooth and uncarved – but then, the other man was barely a man, maybe seventeen, eighteen years of age. His hair was pitch black, an angry cloud of half-curly, thick strands framing a face set in a thunderous frown. He kept his upper arms by his sides as the old chief embraced him tightly, standing very still. The lad was clearly very uncomfortable with being hugged by the chief, and stepped back as soon as the man's huge arms would allow him, looking at his toes stubbornly as the older man's rumbling voice addressed him in quiet, awed tones. The boy did not reply, and after a moment's uncomfortable silence he settled down to sit on a mat on the ground, resting his head in the lap of the man sitting cross-legged behind him.

Qui-Gon looked up into the man's face. Ketoa. With a look of intense concentration on his face, even though he was not chanting along with the rest of the group. A few men of middle age, one or two women, and three pretty young girls, hovering on the sidelines as if unsure of what to do. Ketoa inclined his head, looking down into the tense face of the boy in his lap. The boy whispered something, and Ketoa gestured to the three girls to come closer. When they had knelt down by his side, almost shielding the boy's body from sight, Ketoa looked up at the chief, an almost pleading look under dark closely-drawn brows. A few words softly spoken, and the chief withdrew from the scene, lips a thin black line. Qui-Gon almost felt sorry for him, though he knew not why.

Ketoa had picked up a piece of charcoal in his right hand, wet it with his tongue and began applying it to the reclining boy's face, drawing bold black lines from his nostrils around his slightly quivering mouth to his chin. His hand was steady and calm, as if he had done this millions of times before. Well, he probably had, Qui-Gon mused. Smaller designs on the boy's chin made the lower half of his face appear almost black now, at least from a distance. The older people were still chanting their careless tune, the three girls kneeling by the boy's side not doing much at all.

Then Ketoa laid down the charcoal and reached for a shell and a pair of what looked like polished twigs from where Qui-Gon was standing. One, branched like a miniature hoe, he dipped into the shell, and its previously white tip came out pitch black and glistening. With almost meditative slowness, the young man rested the black tip against the reclining boy's cheek, then swiftly struck the implement with the other, slightly thicker tool. The boy winced slightly, but made no sound. The girls started twittering excitedly, reaching out to let their hands roam over the boy's body, soothing, caressing, distracting as the sharp little chisel kept cutting into the smooth cheek, incising a deep black gash where the charcoal line had been.

The girls' voices joined the older ones' now, low and melodic, caresses raining down on the stony-faced youth's body as the blood flowed from the wound in thin dark stripes, marring the charcoal drawing and dripping on Ketoa's knee as he worked, ceaselessly, with the rhythm of one who had long ceased to look for signs of pain in his subjects. And indeed the boy did not cry out, for all that his eyes were squeezed shut and his lips were pressed tightly together amid what was fast becoming a beard of smudged charcoal, shining ink, blackened gashes and trickles of blood. 

When the boy's mouth finally opened to let out a deep agonised gasp, it was because one of the girls' ministrations had focused on a rather delicate area of his physique, and rather expertly so. The girl giggled and grinned, and Ketoa spared a her a conspiratorial glance before bending his eyes to his work again, looking approvingly at the tense, silent face in his lap. Oh yes, this one would become a work of art yet. Under all that blood and ink lay a great warrior. This boy would be a work of art yet. 

He would make him so.


	10. (In which Qui-Gon tastes the sublime and the disgusting)

It was the next morning, and Qui-Gon had just finished surreptitiously scraping at the insistent stubble on his cheeks with his master's plucking-shells when the chief's imposing figure literally darkened the doorway again. He did not come in, did not come for Qui-Gon to chide him for using his cosmetic implements. He merely looked at him with those fierce sea-blue eyes and held out a hand, rumbling a curt 'tae mai' which simply had to mean something along the lines of 'come here'. 

Qui-Gon got up from the floor quickly and approached the man, who took his wrist in his big hand in the way they were both accustomed to by now. With his newly-regained confidence, Qui-Gon allowed himself to accept the touch, not flinch from it. Yes, the man's hand was warm, and he no longer left bruises on his skin, holding tightly enough to assert his ownership, but gently enough to... well, it felt good. It felt... easy. Breathing in and falling into step behind the tall man, Qui-Gon relaxed into the presence. There was something familiar about walking at someone's shoulder, though he couldn't quite place what it was. But it certainly felt a lot... well, easier to do so now. He realised he was warm all over, pleasantly so. As if the big brutal body held no more threat over his own, slender one. As if... well, yes. He was no longer afraid of being raped and beaten, because his _mind_ would no longer be. Strange thing to realise in the middle of being dragged along a path through a strange village by a scary tattooed man... but that was just it. He was no longer all that scary. Not now that Qui-Gon had an inkling of his own Force back. 

This is how it should be, he thought. Well, almost. He could take that hand off my wrist. 

Though Qui-Gon would have been at a loss to say where he would have preferred that hand.

*** 

The house was small and dark, with nothing but a sleeping mat on the floor, and a supine figure on it. The figure stirred, and as Qui-Gon's eyes grew accustomed to the darkness he thought he recognised the young boy he had seen yesterday. Except his face was barely recognisable, cleansed of the charcoal and the worst of the blood now but swollen up as if he had been kicked in the teeth on both sides, and repeatedly. His mouth was a small pout amid deeply-cut blood-caked black ridges of flesh, and his eyes glittered with suspicion at the sight of the two men entering his house.

Keeping Qui-Gon behind him with a sharp tug on the slave's wrist, the chief spoke to the young man in quiet, measured tones. The only reaction he got was a faint grumble from below. Sighing, the chief released Qui-Gon's wrist and strode over to one corner of the house, picking up a small bowl that he must have known was standing there. Crouching down at the boy's side, he entreated him in earnest, clipped tones, again getting no reaction beyond the fierce glitter of eyes. Pressing his lips into a thin line, the old man scooped a small quantity of the mushy brown contents of the bowl up with two fingertips, then smelled it, relaxing his features into a soft grin. Qui-Gon could almost hear that cracked earthy voice saying 'it's quite good really', even though what he was saying was dripping from his mouth in that strange flowing language they all spoke. With a quick gesture, the chief motioned for Qui-Gon to kneel down at the boy's bed too, then held the bowl out for him, smiling. 

Ah, he wants me to show him it's good too, Qui-Gon thought, and dipped two fingers in as he had seen his master do, then carefully tasted the food. True, it was quite – 

A kick to his thigh nearly sent him sprawling on the floor. The boy was glaring up at him, clearly in a mood to shout if the state of his face had permitted him that. Shocked, Qui-Gon looked up at his master, who could not help chuckling, lending an altogether strange expression to the savagely tattooed face. Those little lines around his eyes... calming the angry boy with one large palm on his arm, the old chief explained to Qui-Gon what he was supposed to be doing. Not that the words made any sense to him, but the man's other hand spoke clearly enough. Ah. So he was supposed to feed the boy. But couldn't he do that himself...? Oh well, Qui-Gon thought, better not ask this one any questions. He seems to like me even less than he likes my master.

Still, he diligently scooped up the soft mush fingertipful after fingertipful, urging the food between the disgusted-looking lips under the watchful gaze of the older man, hoping all the time that the boy would be wise enough not to bite down. Given the state of his jaw, that would probably be as painful to the boy himself as it would be to the hapless slave, but still, you never knew. 

For all his protesting, the boy must have been hungry though – the bowl was nearly empty when he finally refused to eat more and resolutely turned on his side, his back to his visitors. The chief caught Qui-Gon's questioning gaze and nodded, smiling slightly as if grateful for the service. The man is beautiful when he smiles, Qui-Gon thought, can't help being beautiful even through all that tattoo. Or maybe it's just because I can now finally bring myself to look at him.

The hand that took hold of his wrist was warm and good, and Qui-Gon followed eagerly, back to the house. Walking at someone's shoulder felt good, felt right. It was... easier now.

It certainly was easier to administer the customary treatment to the big man's face, hunting down new beard hairs with his fingertips, looking closely nevertheless, for the few white ones the man had were easily missed by touch alone. They were softer. And he found he enjoyed running his fingertips over the rugged landscape of his master's face, tracing the lines and swirls of the man's tattoo, stealing a touch of those impossibly full blackened lips. Oh, the thirst was still there, the longing, but it was... well, less now, and more. Less because it didn't feel like it was threatening to pull him under any minute, and more because... well, it was there all the time now. Not just when he was touching the man's face, not just when his master's large hand closed around his wrist. It was there pretty much all the time. He thought of his master a lot, and, well... not just in terms of his master. He was a mighty strange man, mighty and strange, and... fine to touch. Gorgeous actually. Have I forgotten I don't... like men that way, he thought, then told himself he might as well forget that as well now. His body was humming with contentment at the touch, and his mind was occupied elsewhere.

The food... with a mischievous grin, Qui-Gon laid the plucking-shells aside and darted over to where they had left the nearly-finished bowl of mush. Yes, he was hungry, that much was true. But he wasn't going to put the stuff in his mouth, hearty though the taste was. 

Scooping a little up with two fingertips, he raised his hand to the sceptical face of his master. As his fingers approached the black mouth, the most amazing thing happened. The big man's lips split in the most radiant grin Qui-Gon could ever remember seeing, little lines of mirth spreading out across the artfully scarred skin and a low guttural laugh rumbling from the depths of the bare chest. Qui-Gon blinked away a tear of relief – right now, he felt like falling into the big man's arms and disappearing there, like slaking that constant thirst from those lips... lips that were... slowly closing around his fingertips, sucking the mush off. 

Qui-Gon hadn't managed to close his mouth yet before his fingertips had already darted back to the bowl and up again, laden with a new dollop of food, begging entrance. And they were received well, held in place by gentle teeth while an insistent tongue licked them clean. The man's eyes were still sparkling in amusement, but the noise low in his throat spoke another language entirely. Qui-Gon couldn't decide whether it was more of a purr or a growl. Not that he needed to decide. The lips released his wet fingers slowly, possessively almost, and the chief's heavy hands fell on his shoulders, pushing him down to a kneeling position before his seat. The muscular thighs parted slightly, and the impossibly blue eyes narrowed with a challenge. There was nothing of the commanding about him now, nothing save the irresistible aura of Force around him, the currents that pulsed through that marvellous hard body, calling to Qui-Gon to drink, to plunge in and swim.

Hesitantly, he parted the woven strands of the man's kilt, running his hands up the strong, black-marked thighs. Torn between disgust at how easily he could be brought to do this and sheer throbbing desire, he bent down to where the soft flaxen strands parted to reveal the hard deep red tip of the man's cock.

Oh Force, it's huge. A... a weapon. Hesitant hands brushed away the last strands of the kilt, tingling with a mix of terror and need that made him feel hot and cold at the same time, all the way to his fingertips. Why am I doing this? Who am I, doing this? To the man who... well, I could say he abused me. But my body loved it, didn't it? The sheer brutal strength, the helpless struggles, that hard warm hand on my cock... Qui-Gon squirmed a little in his kneeling position, fully aware that yes, his body liked it. Liked even the memory of the brutal possession at the hands and body of this man who claimed him for his own. Oh, my body liked it. And my mind... well, my mind still doesn't know what to think. But I am not... I'm not afraid any more. Not of what happened anyway. Maybe of what will happen. Force, the thing is... hard. And big.

Blushing, Qui-Gon looked down at the evidence of his own arousal, barely hidden under the fabric of his leggings. But what would I look like, he thought, at such close quarters? Blinking hard, Qui-Gon realised he couldn't remember, couldn't even remember pleasuring himself. A complete blank. A blank filled by an insistent column of hard flesh so close to his face that he could smell it. He should stink, a small voice in the back of his head supplied. He should stink, he's a savage... he smells... he _tastes_ like the earth, his reeling mind replied as the taste of the man's flesh invaded his mouth. Salty. Strong, and old, and alive. Pulling back slightly to gasp in a deep breath, Qui-Gon marvelled wordlessly at the sight of the dark engorged cock, now glistening where he had kissed it. Tasted like... like more.

The need overtook him like a wave crashing on to the shore, and he almost fell forward into the earthy, salty taste, holding on like a drowning man, and feeding, feeding, licking greedily, sucking the warmth deep inside him. Oh, it was good. It was tender and soft as silk, dirty wet silk that clung to him, clung to the insides of his mouth, filling him with the flavour and the need, and it was so good. So warm and so hard, mercilessly gloriously hard, a shaft of pure strength in his grasping palm, something to hold fast, to squeeze and devour endlessly. The sound of his own gasping breaths was loud in his ears, he heard his own jaw working trying to suck as much of the perfect flesh in as he could... and the earth moaned. No, the man moaned, in that cracked earthquake voice of his, loud ragged sounds of pure need that tasted so so good and filled that gaping emptiness inside so perfectly, like water, like flesh, like pure Force in his mouth, in his body, everywhere inside and around him... he was hot, prickly with sweat, and aroused all over, greedy for that oh so good flesh, greedy for the pulse of goodness that made the hard cock move, thrust into his hungry willing mouth and he wished this could go on for ever, just feeding, filling, making him full and whole and so good, so good...

And no, it must not go on forever, there must be more, and he sucked harder as the moans got louder and the thrusts harder, reaching for his own erection as the thick earthy cock fucked his mouth savagely, deeply, and never deep enough to quite fill him but oh, the singing in his ears was good, and he moaned in hungry greed as the warm drops spilled down his throat, as the musky flesh that filled his mouth twitched and pulsed in animal ecstasy. 

Oh, it was good. It tasted bitter, and clung thickly to the roof of his mouth, but he swallowed it quickly so that he could have more, more of the glow that surrounded the man, more of the skin that tasted so good, of salt and earth and musk and brutal living Force and he knew not who he was, nor who he himself was, but he knew for certain that he had not yet had enough, that he craved more, craved to press his lips to the strange dark skin and sink into the flesh, the flesh that sang with deep low growls of pleasure and with the song of the Force itself.

Sweaty flanks so warm, and tiny brown nipples so hard and so delicious under his lips, like small rough fruits... and the hand, the huge warm hand hard in his hair, pulling his face up to meet that of the other man, close-up, a maelstrom of black and tan and fierce eyes glistening with unabated desire and possession, and no, he did not resist when the big hands pushed him away. He knew beyond a doubt that it was only to allow the big man to rise out of his seat and lie down on the floor with him... he knew not how he knew, but his body sang with the certainty. And so he allowed himself to watch in awe as the man stretched out on his side on the floor, head propped up on one elbow, hair streaming messily to the floor and that slight smile playing around those full lips, sea-blue eyes bright, and all that skin, all that long, wonderful body... too fast to be reverent yet too slow for his own tastes (oh, the taste...), Qui-Gon let his hands roam up those long legs, marvelling at how pale his hands looked against the bronzed skin, how crude they seemed against the savage lace of the tattooing on the man's thighs, all the way up... impatient, Qui-Gon brushed the strands of the flax kilt out of the way, away over the man's waist, and marvelled at the sight.

Perfect round buttocks, skin softened just that little bit with age. But such fine strong flesh underneath... and so beautiful. Swirling out from the centre of each, a wide black spiral covered the man's skin, merging into the thigh ornament where it ended, after having covered the whole backside and turned it into a living work of art. Deep bluish black lines, quite wide and yet almost smooth, not cut as deeply as the lines on the man's face, and... delicious to the taste, barely noticeable indentations under Qui-Gon's questing tongue. Painted everywhere, everywhere... except in that sensitive area just above and between the two spirals. Thin delicate skin on his lower back. He ran his fingertips over it, rubbing softly, trailed nails over it, barely there, barely touching. The man shuddered, thrusting his hips a little. The spirals moved. Qui-Gon chuckled.

The long-haired head whipped around, eyes crinkled in amusement. Slowly, the man reached out one long arm, settling his hand on the back of Qui-Gon's neck. Grabbing loosely. Sending shivers down his spine, sizzling down to where his hardness still throbbed insistently, quietly, awedly. That hand on his neck, possessing. Urging him on, a little lower, a little closer. Arching into the grip like an animal, Qui-Gon raised his face to gaze into the other man's eyes. He heard the words, and understood. Not the words, he understood the hand, and the eyes, and the skin. Breathing deeply, Qui-Gon slid his hands to either side of the cleft, gently pulled the cheeks apart, and leaned in to taste.

Ugh -

He gasped. Choked for more breath, and drew more of that putrid vile taste into his mouth. Distantly, he felt his throat closing as if he tried to expel his own tongue, and the taste that clung to it, felt tears rushing to his eyes as he tried in vain to control the retching that kept him from breathing, kept him from thinking clearly. He wiped at his mouth, at his tongue, with a hand, oh but the hand smelled just as awful, everything was full of that disgusting rotten taste, and the hand... he had to clamp the hand over his mouth, his whole face trembling, his body shivering cold as he leapt up in a cold horror, unseeing, barely breathing, just out, just not in here, not here...

He only noticed the threshold stopping his escape when he'd tripped already. Caught himself on his hands, tumbling gracelessly on to the wet ground just outside the door, retching convulsively, hot tears falling from his screwed-shut eyes on to the soiled earth. 

Not like this not like this oh why did I have to... he was so good. So good. The thought of himself sucking the big man's cock sent his stomach into convulsions again, useless cramps trying to empty what was empty already. But he _was_ , he thought, through the cold red haze of cramping muscles, he was so... warm... I want him so. So much. So much more. 

Disgusted at himself, Qui-Gon turned away from the mess on the ground, wiping at his eyes, nose, mouth uselessly. I should just curl up and die somewhere. Curl up and die. Inside him. 

Fresh sobs wracked his body at the thought. Just get away from here, before his scorn finds me, he thought miserably. Just get away... pulling his legs up against his body from where they had been lying sprawled across the threshold, he encountered resistance. 

Warm resistance. Peering up through tear-fogged eyes before his mind had caught up and told him this was probably not a good idea, he saw the figure of the chief standing in the doorway, naked feet brushing against his legs, face blank under the savage swirls of black. Eyes grey. 

/ /mine... please.../ /


	11. (In which Qui-Gon acquires yet another name, and it isn't his own)

Qui-Gon truly did not know which to recoil from first – the foot brushing against his thigh, the slow hand reaching for his shoulder, or the voice in his mind. Had he really just heard that? Impossible. Voices in your head were supposed to be... he recalled, with a clarity that seemed simply unreal in the fog that was his present, what voices in your head were supposed to sound like. They were voices, for one thing, words plain as if they were written, clear and purposeful. For a moment, he caught an image of the person whose voice had been the one in his head, a clean-cut, sober grey-haired man, pale, with a long nose and an earnest expression. 

/ /Mine... please, no./ /

Qui-Gon jerked in shock. This was not... he searched in vain for a way to explain to himself. He did not hear the voice... did not hear the words at any rate. What he had in his head was like the memory of having heard a voice speak, like the echo of words, and his mind flooded with the images the words gave him. He did not comprehend. But he felt like he understood, and he did not understand why or how.

The real voice was making soothing noises, nonsense vowels, and the chief's big hand had settled on his shoulder, warm and dry against his cold sweaty skin. He felt miserable. And yet he was absolutely certain he would feel much more miserable if the man, and his voice, and his hand, weren't here.

/ /Mine, mine... it pains me to see you cry./ /

Qui-Gon stared up into the scarred face in mute amazement. The man's brows were drawn together in concentration and – was it sadness under those furious black lines? The eyes were mild and grey, and... deep as the sea itself. I must be hallucinating, he thought. I am hearing things.

Things I wish he would say.

/ /Please, mine... I don't want to... ah, I can't even call you by a name, mine.../ /

"Qui-Gon," he supplied automatically, forgetting his resolve not to believe that voice just as he had forgotten the acid taste in his mouth. He cleared his throat, wincing. "Qui-Gon Jinn."

The man nodded, thoughtfully, as if trying to accustom himself to the fact that his slave might have a name, then slowly, hesitantly, spoke. 

"Kuai-kone. Kuai...?"

"Qui." Force, he _looked_ like he had some measure of understanding of what he was saying. And I wish, I wish, Qui-Gon thought. Then took the plunge. 

/ /Qui will do.../ /

The chief's face lit up, and Qui-Gon quite distinctly felt his insides melt at the smile that resided in those eyes, and in the tiny lines around them. 

/ /Kuai. Too short a name for so long a boy, don't you think...?/ / The chief's hand left his shoulders, gesturing down the length of Qui-Gon's body, sprawled as he was on the floor, all thoughts of curling up into a miserable ball forgotten. The warmth was back, and the nagging desire that smile always brought out in him. Qui-Gon blushed a little, looking down his tall gangly frame, grown too fast to be really graceful. His eyes kept sliding back to the older man's muscular bronzed body, haven of savage strength. And yet he had these smiles, and he had that voice... that voice that sang with the Force as it echoed inside his head, carrying images and thoughts. And feelings. 

Qui-Gon attempted an answering smile, forcing himself to remember the grins on the children's faces the first time they had heard his name, then spoke softly into the other man's mind. 

/ /My full name does not seem suited to your tongues... the children called me by another name./ /

Eyebrows rose in curiosity. / /What name did they give you?/ /

/ /Hine/ /

And the earth laughed. The cracked dark voice melted in an open, warm laugh that sounded like arms outstretched in welcome, inviting to join in the merriment. "Hine...," the big man snorted in amusement, "hine!"

Qui-Gon was torn between drinking in the warm rumbling laugh, never knowing when he'd next find his master so friendly and open, and interrupting him to find out what on earth was so funny. When finally the laughter had died down into rough, earthy chuckles, he saw a tear of mirth escape the corner of the chief's eye, cradled in the swirl of tattoo next to it. He is beautiful, Qui-Gon thought, unbidden. Well, it's just true, he answered, to himself. Just true.

/ /Nothing could be further from the truth, Kuai mine. They named you a girl?/ /

/ /A girl?/ /

"Hine." The mental image that accompanied the softly-spoken word was that of a grinning young girl with slender hands and long curly hair. Qui-Gon looked down at his hands, large, bony and a little awkward, then chuckled. 

/ /It means 'girl'?/ /

/ /That it does. Not what I think of when I see you./ / The amusement was half in the mental voice, half in the smiling eyes, bluer now, or so they seemed.

"Hine... Jinn... Jinn-e." / /Yes, I suppose so./ /

/ /They don't know what they're talking about, mine... Kuai. Your name tastes strange on my tongue./ /

Qui-Gon froze, trying not to project the disgust that had overcome him at the taste of the master's most intimate flesh. And yet he had wanted to do it, hadn't he? It had been pleasure until then... though he couldn't help noticing now how the man was keeping his distance, squatting on the floor half a step away, looking down on his slave. The hand had not returned to his chilled shoulder. 

/ /As would yours, I imagine... master,/ / he added, hesitantly.

/ /You haven't heard?/ / The eyebrows rose again, then the older man shook his head, snorting as if to remind himself that they hadn't shared a language until a few minutes ago.

"Te Awaroa." / /They call me that, and lord. And father. And... master. Though not many do that, and not many should./ / 

"Te Awaroa..." Qui-Gon let the unfamiliar name roll around his tongue, savouring the sounds, realising too late that maybe he was not in a position to call his owner by his given name. He bit his lip, staring uncertainly at the broad face above him, half-expecting an enraged assault. Half-wanting it, and blushing for shame. What was wrong with him? He could no longer pretend it was the wild streak of Force running through this man that he so desired. Not now that he had his own touch of it back. It wasn't what made the voice in his head sound, it wasn't that that was so good... it was the voice itself... and the voice was saying things to him. The real voice.

Qui-Gon's head snapped up, embarrassed even though he knew the words of that gravelly voice did not mean a thing to his ears. He had been inattentive. He had missed out on several moments of his master's voice, and he secretly mourned the loss, trying to hold on to the last syllables of that strange tongue as they slipped through his fingers. A hand reached out for his wrist, tugging gently but purposefully.

/ /Come up. I feel there is something I need to show you./ /

The rumble of Te Awaroa's voice was rather longer than his thoughts, and Qui-Gon found himself bathing in it. Now that that voice was capable of speaking his name... or was it the Force that had opened up between them? Whatever it was, it felt... easier now. It felt right to listen to that voice. His master's voice.

"...taku Kuai." Yes, there it was. He had said his name. Qui-Gon felt inordinately warm inside, his cramped stomach easing into exhausted relaxation. Carefully avoiding the stain of vomit on the ground, he rose to his feet, unfolding. He was almost his master's height. Funny how that only occurred to him now. The hand on his wrist was a comforting presence. If only all of this could be as solid as that hand, as easy as that faint smile Te Awaroa sometimes wore... wore when looking at him. If only he hadn't spoiled it all by almost throwing up all over him... still, the chief seemed to be inclined to forgive. Or to hold on, and demand more. At least he calls me by my name now, Qui-Gon thought. That is something. Something like my name.

"Taku Kuai?" he asked, as if thirsty to hear it again. Damn, he was, all told.

Te Awaroa's savage mouth quirked in an indulgent smile. The hand on Qui-Gon's wrist tightened.

/ /It means 'mine'./ /


	12. (In which Qui-Gon loses the last of his clothing)

The ground was treacherous under his feet, and even though he made an attempt at stepping on to the flats of the large fern leaves at every step to avoid the hardened broken-off stalks in the middle that could be as tough as old wood, he was not making headway as well as he should. Or maybe he was just too busy trying to keep up. Keep up with the big man's comfortable barefoot stride, keep up with the crazy whirlwind in his head.

The hand was no longer on his wrist, but there wasn't really a doubt as to who was leading the way. Besides, the path, if it could be called that, barely a groove cut into the lush undergrowth, was descending ever more steeply now so that the master... Te Awaroa, Qui-Gon reminded himself, that is his name... would very probably have ended up being bowled over by a heap of clumsy stumbling slave if he wasn't careful, or far enough away. 

It had begun to rain again, as it did almost every day in this place, and this time the cold drops were not entirely unwelcome. They washed away the cold sweat and the stench of embarrassment and terror. They made his leggings, held up perfunctorily by a string of whatever it was that the tribe wove their own clothes from, cling to his thighs and chafe at his skin. He wouldn't mind taking them off now, actually, if only he could be sure that whoever would be at the end of this mystery trip would not read the wrong signals into the Padawan's nakedness.

The... Qui-Gon stumbled, blinked, caught himself just in time. Where had that come from, all of a sudden? The word echoed inside his head, flickering. Padawan... Qui-Gon formed the syllables with his lips, barely whispering, as if his Master could have overheard him anyway, steps ahead as he was and nearly swallowed up in the din of cicadas, birds, and groaning trees.

Padawan.

He had no clue what the word meant, but was positive it meant him. He was Padawan, had answered to that name where he had come from. Had answered to the voice he had heard in his head before he had begun hearing his master's voice in his head. Had followed behind just as he was following his master now... well, a little more closely perhaps than now, now that he was struggling to keep up with the big man as he determinedly made his way down through the thick ferny undergrowth as if convinced that the wild vegetation would make way for him just here, just like this, just because he wanted it to. 

Then again, maybe that was simply the case. The man was so full of this strange current of Force that maybe it obeyed him, like... Qui-Gon grinned involuntarily as he remembered floating the calabash full of muck. That had been the beginning. That had been when it had started to get better. Or so he had thought. In truth, he did not know what to think or whether to think at all at the sight of his master making his way down the steep wooded slope, huge dirty feet dancing forcefully over the treacherous ground, the muscles of his lower back playing easily to keep him balanced, and all that thick tangled greying hair streaming over his back, clinging at the tips, from the rain. He truly did not know what to think beyond the obvious – that this man was his anchor, his owner, his... his everything. He had felt so good when... was it wrong to wish for his master to be his lover? Was that what he wanted him to be? And was that what his master was willing to give to him...?

The path had evened out, and the woodland had lightened up, and Qui-Gon gasped in surprise as he thudded into his master's broad wet back. What had the man stopped for... Qui-Gon yelped as a strong hard arm grabbed him around the waist, and his world tilted on its axis as he found himself swung around and toppled over backwards, falling into the sky... water...

He rose to the surface spluttering and panting, attempting to dart a fierce look up at his master still standing at the top of the small cliff and failing utterly. Te Awaroa stood there in the rain, laughing that earth-warming laugh of his, slowly divesting himself of his kilt and grinning down at his soaked slave before taking an elegant dive and disappearing into the green waters of the pool. 

Never to be seen again. Nervous, Qui-Gon looked around. There was the woodland above them, where they had come from. There was quite an expanse of sand on the other side, and water, a strait maybe or a rivermouth, sand strewn with sharp-looking grey rocks and criss-crossed with small erratic rivulets of rainwater. There was a thin noisy waterfall where the rain cascaded off the slope they had come down and tumbled into the warm green water Qui-Gon found himself barely standing in. Green, murky, and smelling of earth and rain. Warm. Good. 

Something grabbed him by his hips and yanked, hard. Screaming in surprise and struggling to free himself, Qui-Gon only succeeded in sending up huge splashes of green water as the insistent weight held him under while strong hands worked his sodden leggings off him despite his mad struggles to get to the surface for breath. When he finally broke through and heaved in a huge lungful of rain-washed air, he was no longer surprised to find the arm clamping his own upper arms to his sides was his master's... nor the other hand... wrapped firmly around his cock, squeezing hard, making him throb and harden as he thrashed helplessly in the big man's embrace, feeling Te Awaroa's own hardness stabbing him in the back, just like when they'd first met, but so, so much better now, so much closer...

/ /...struggle... so sweetly, boy.../ /

The teasing tone of the voice in his head, the rhythm of his master's heavy breathing in his ear, the insistent pumping of the hand that possessed him totally, controlling him, owning him, making him scream with delight as a hard fingertip rubbed against that most sensitive spot on his body, mercilessly driving him towards a breathless climax... it was all too much. Too much and too fast, and too good. His whole body a lightning arc of spasming pleasure, Qui-Gon writhed in the tight embrace as he came, a roar on his lips that was beyond words.

Or so he thought. When he came back to himself, limp now and still held tight by those hard arms, he found himself facing a quirked eyebrow and a questioning look in those improbably blue eyes. 

"Mataa?" Te Awaroa murmured, curious.

/ /Master/ / Qui-Gon flushed, and could not tell whether it was from the heat of the water, his recent orgasm, or from the pure animal sincerity in those eyes.

"Matua," the older man's voice rumbled, then repeated, in his head, / /Master/ /.

"Matua?", Qui-Gon repeated, unsure. / /That is almost the word... the word I use/ /.

/ /Some things are yours as well as mine, Kuai mine.../ / Te Awaroa chuckled and gave Qui-Gon's buttocks a little squeeze as if to illustrate his point. Qui-Gon grinned, wriggling a little, and finding that he enjoyed the skin contact far too much to give it up. In fact... pushing himself up with his hands on Te Awaroa's arms, he brought his face closer and closer to the older man's, closer and closer until his world consisted of nothing but the delicate swirls of black on tanned skin, nothing but the greyish blue of those eyes, nothing but the taste of those pliant darkened lips on his... and he feasted, suckling on the delicate flesh, running the tip of his tongue over the smooth moist warmth of the man's mouth, pressing his lips against his master's and drinking of him deeply. 

When he withdrew, flushed and with the beginnings of a second arousal stirring in his groin, he found the grey-blue eyes staring into him, unreadable. 

"M-matua?"

The older man shook his head, as if to dispel a lingering thought, then focused on his young slave again, nude, soaked, those pale lips pinked and moist, the finest of meats...

Qui-Gon had seen the pounce coming, had anticipated the slight tensing of Te Awaroa's muscles. Letting himself fall sideways into the water, he wriggled out of his master's grip like a fish, laughing, inviting chase. 

/ /Catch me - / /

/ /And catch you I will, impudent boy!/ /

*** 

Minutes later, the only thing Te Awaroa felt like catching was his breath, bracing himself against a moss-covered rock underneath the noisy little waterfall, trying not to scream in undignified need as Qui-Gon's rough little tongue flicked and teased at his anus, sending little spears of desire through his most delicate flesh while the boy's hands kept a firm hold on his master's throbbing cock and balls. Just the thought of the exquisite pale boy's face buried in his flesh, licking with abandon, was quite enough to take him to the edge, and he thrust sharply into the restraining hand, only to feel the grip on his balls tightening almost to the point of pain. Almost. He rocked back automatically, and found himself speared by a slick tongue. A thick moan escaped him, much to his boy's satisfaction, for the hand around his balls loosened and the one around his cock moved just a tiny little bit. Savage with desire, Te Awaroa thrust again, desperate for release, desperate for an end to this delicious torture, an end that was not forthcoming. 

He thought he heard a chuckle against the base of his spine as he writhed madly in the grip of those surprisingly strong hands, moaning desperately now, gasping for breath, for the strength to just throw this infuriating boy off and fuck him senseless... gathering his wavering strength, Te Awaroa braced himself against the rock, drawing a deep breath – 

and expelling it in a 'whoosh' of surprise as he felt a tiny fluttering touch against the tip of his straining cock. He stared, incredulous. The boy's hands were still wrapped firmly around his shaft and his balls, refusing to budge. His face, his tongue, bless his tongue, was still busy behind him... but this touch was there nevertheless. Not to be seen, only to be felt. And it felt... good, so good...

Thrusting savagely between that elusive touch and the wriggling tongue and those merciless hands, Te Awaroa roared in pleasure as he splashed his seed on to the wet rock, milked gently by those hands that just would not let him go until he was spent and sated, limp in his Kuai's sinewy arms, heavy and warm...

*splash*

Wrestling the mischievous lad under the chilly waterfall, the only thing that was louder in his ears than the rushing water was the sound of Kuai's moan as he drowned his mouth in his own.

*** 

/ /You don't seem particularly inclined to leave this place now, do you?/ / The twinkle in Te Awaroa's eyes was only slightly mischievous, his face softened by exhaustion and satiation.

/ /Thanks to you, _master_ , I have lost my last scrap of clothing in this murky pool. And I'm not much inclined to walk all the way home naked, no. Not in broad daylight./ / He pouted. / /Besides, you don't seem too keen on climbing back up that path right now, do you?/ /

/ /Brat./ /

Qui-Gon merely grinned. 

/ /I could make you walk home naked and whip you with fern-stalks all the way if I wanted, just to watch your pretty flesh pink.../ /

Qui-Gon stared, half-aroused, half-terrified. He had very nearly forgotten his position, forgotten under the influence of this strange familiarity of voice and touch.

Te Awaroa slid one huge hand around the back of Qui-Gon's head, tilting it towards him. / /Forgive me? For... being unwashed?/ /

Qui-Gon shook his head, grinning embarrassedly. / /Just don't remind me. I'm trying to memorise here how good you taste when you're clean... master./ / He looked up into the older man's face, melting a little at Te Awaroa's gaze. / /Just where did you get these impossibly blue eyes from?/ /

/ /My mother sat on a piece of sky./ /

Qui-Gon chuckled, warming inside as he watched the little laugh lines around the twin pools of blue crinkle. 

/ /In truth, there isn't a single one of the Ngati Wainui with sky-ish eyes. Not even in my family... I'm the bizarre one if you like.../ /

"Ngati Wainui." Qui-Gon's tongue tasted the strange name. So that was the name of these people.

/ /People of the Great Water./ / Te Awaroa made a sweeping gesture towards the horizon, splashing water droplets all around. / /And not even my son has kept them, the little skies in his head when he was a baby. He went dark, just like the rest of us./ /

/ /You have a son?/ / Qui-Gon's head reeled. But... he had only seen the master lie with another man...?

"Rangirua." / /We named him Two-Skies when he was born, so bright were his eyes, and so big, as if he wanted to see the whole world in one gaze./ / The older man's lips had narrowed imperceptibly. / /Not that he looks up at me as he does at the sky any more./ /

/ /Who... the boy we.../ /

/ /Yes. His mother ran away when he was still small./ /

/ /Oh./ / Not sure whether to ask any more or whether to offer compassion to his master, Qui-Gon joined the uncomfortable silence for a few moments, then gently changed the subject.

/ /Well... there's two freaks now I suppose. Me with my pale skin and blue eyes, and you with your.../ /

/ /And you've got the witchpower as well./ /

Qui-Gon's mouth fell open, then closed again as he realised Te Awaroa wouldn't understand him if he spoke anyhow. A large blunt finger forestalled his reply, settling on his lips.

/ /I felt it... in a most delicate area./ / A chuckle. / /If you weren't a plainfaced little slave I'd be trembling before you like the people are trembling before me, Kuai. That sort of thing is a gift from the gods. Don't tell me you haven't heard the stories they tell about me behind my back? Not that they're not true, mind, but.../ /

/ /Master, I do not understand your people's language./ /

Te Awaroa shook his head, cutting him off with a curt gesture. / /I keep forgetting. Well then, imagine me at about your age, still in the wars, and there I was alone in the woods, drinking from a pool much like this one, and suddenly there's this army of enemies surrounding me, one hundred, two hundred of them, all around. They knew who they were facing though, and dared not advance. They wanted me to attack, see, so they could retaliate. Only I didn't. I could read the fear in their eyes, boy. So I stood, wiped my mouth, lifted my kilt, and calmly peed./ /

Qui-Gon snorted in amused surprise. / /You _pissed_ at them?/ /

/ /That you may well say. When I was done, and they were still staring, I raised my voice and spoke to them - / /

And Te Awaroa cleared his throat and let his voice ring out throughout the dripping forest and along the dusky beach, the syllables of his native tongue sounding like an earthquake about to happen.

He peered at Qui-Gon, who sat in eager anticipation of an explanation.

/ /I said to them, you have now seen Te Awaroa's weapon. Be sure that if you advance any further, his powers will kill you./ /

/ /And they...?/ /

/ /They ran. As fast as their feet would carry them./ / The smirk on the chief's face was altogether too smug not to be kissed away immediately.

The splashing of the waterfall drowned out the two men's laughter, drowned out the shrieks of the night birds waking up. Drowned out the careful steps of the observer as he retreated, fascinated and afraid of what he had seen and heard.


	13. (In which Qui-Gon sits on a piece of sky)

Qui-Gon adjusted the belt around his waist, wincing slightly at the scrape of the coarse material of his short kilt against the skin, freshly bruised as it was from Te Awaroa's possessive grip the night before. They hadn't made it home until the early morning, and only around midday had the chief deigned to give Qui-Gon one of his old kilts, finally persuaded that letting his personal slave run around naked was not the way to show off his property.

Of course the kilt was too big for him – he was noticeably thinner than his master, even if they almost matched each other in height. He truly hoped he would one day fill out into such a fine figure of a man as his master was... and until then, he would just have to tie that belt tighter and bear the chafing sensation. Cataloguing your aches was not exactly a bad thing. Not when they were sustained in the delicious way most of his were. 

One ache, though, had receded almost completely over the last 24 hours. The ache in the back of his head, the one that had lingered since he had woken up in the dark house for the first time, flaring up now and then.... the ache that kept trying to tell him that he didn't belong, that he ought to go home. 

He remembered more and more with time. That he had walked at someone's shoulder. That he had been called Padawan. That he had had a voice in his head, and that the voice belonged to a chilly but kind face, thin and grey-haired. That there had been dancing at some point, and something called Llipe. Someone called Llipe, he surmised, though no voice or face was forthcoming. That the Force was with him. That he was one of many there, not the only one out like he was here. Not the only one, focused on with fierce determination and savage desire... he found his thoughts trailing off into familiar waters again. Te Awaroa. He had been in there for far too long already. Qui-Gon felt his insides warm and tighten at the thought of his master's touch. He found he craved it much like a drug, after that first heady dose... and as far as he was concerned, that drug need not wear off any time soon.

Though he could always do with another shot.

Picking up a random handful of the fern roots he'd been cleaning, he walked around the back of the house, ostensibly towards the cooking pit. He heard voices from inside the house, loud voices raised in argument. One voice made the little hairs on the nape of his neck stand on end with its sheer brutal power and beauty. The other was darting in and out of the angry rumble of Te Awaroa's voice, lashing out at him like an enraged small predator. Qui-Gon crept closer, marvelling at how warlike their strange language sounded all of a sudden.

The small predator voice was grunting now, obviously in pain or at least in resistance, as if its owner was trapped in a fight, struggling. Trying his best not to make a sound, Qui-Gon knelt down and peeked through a crack between the tightly-packed bundles of rushes that passed for a wall.

There was Te Awaroa, growling as he held a much smaller man in a stranglehold, a man that was kicking and squirming for all he was worth, uttering what sounded clearly like strangled curses through the constriction around his throat. His hair had fallen into his face, shiny and black, but Qui-Gon needed only one glimpse of the chin with its slight cleft and notable absence of tattoo, to see who it was. 

Ketoa. In what was obviously a lover's quarrel with Te Awaroa. 

I should be worried, Qui-Gon thought hazily. I should be scared, maybe. But all he found in himself was rapt amazement at watching the skilful way with which the big man wrestled his lover to the ground, pinning him there despite his furious struggling and writhing. Qui-Gon had little doubt that Te Awaroa's 'weapon' was hard and ready, so ready to take what was his... and he only wished that he was the young man struggling in the chief's iron grip, mashed into the ground by his warm weight and irresistible strength. 

He would enjoy it. And he had given up telling himself he ought to be ashamed for that. Fact was, he would enjoy it.

While Ketoa clearly wasn't.

Spitting words into Te Awaroa's face, he tried his best to claw at the big man's skin, never quite reaching far enough, unable to extricate his upper arms from where they were held in the big man's paws and pressed firmly into the ground. His knees struggled fruitlessly to get some leverage, to jab into some soft part of his captor's body, but it was useless. He was utterly trapped. Trapped under the hard, hot body of his infuriating lover, who was gazing down at him with an equally infuriating smirk.

The words got quieter, more menacing... Qui-Gon winced as the younger man bared his teeth in a grimace of hatred, then spat into Te Awaroa's face, using the split second of shock to buck his hips up and get one leg free from under him. It was not enough to properly knee him into the groin, but it was enough to free himself, struggling to his feet, shouting. Qui-Gon could feel the anger radiating off him, even though he didn't understand a word of what he was saying. Jealousy does not need an interpreter, he thought numbly, as Ketoa straightened his clothes and backed out of the house, showering abuse on Te Awaroa all the way, not even listening to the other man's increasingly loud retorts. The words that repeated over and over again until they rang in Qui-Gon's ears were "ki te marae, ki te marae", shouted like a triumphant mantra of hate by Ketoa as he stalked out of the house.

The look on Ketoa's face when he walked by Qui-Gon was one of pure evil pleasure.

*** 

/ /So he demands.../ /

/ /The ceremony, yes. In public./ / "Ki te marae."

/ /Who is he to... I mean, where does he take the authority from? Over you, the chief?/ /

/ /Tradition, Kuai mine. That is what even my place in this world rests on. Tradition is what Ketoa knows best about. Tradition is what he bears on his face where I bear the marks of the warrior. It is older than I, that learning. And... do not think I do not have enemies./ / He sighed, clearly pained.

/ /Obviously./ / Qui-Gon took a deep breath, then looked up at his master. / /So for your world to stay on its axis, Ketoa demands.../ /

/ /...tradition demands... though it is he who demanded this rite for the first time in generations, yes./ /

/ /...demands that you.../ /

/ /Rape you./ /

Qui-Gon frowned. / /That seems fairly impossible to me./ /

/ /Oh Kuai. The other way is to be driven away and live as a tribeless one, one who has rebelled against the gods' rules by refusing to put a mere slave in his proper place. And yes, I have given a lot of thought to that recently. But that would mean renouncing my rights to you as well - / /

/ /Wait a minute. Master. When I said that raping me seemed impossible to me, I meant it. Whatever you would do to me, it would not _be_ rape./ /

/ /I could not... not now I know you.../ /

/ /Of course you could not. Listen. You will not. You will not rape me. You will take me, but not against my will. Never against my will./ /

/ /Have you ever - / /

/ /No. But that does not matter now. Whatever the pain, I will know it's only your body giving mine pain, only because you have to, this once. I have your voice, remember?/ /

/ /You have my voice. You have... sometimes I think you have me, not the other way round, Kuai mine. And that it hurts _me_ to have to humiliate you so./ / 

/ /Master. I won't break. I am.../ / the word slipped off his tongue and back into the darkened regions of his memory again. He was something, and something that gave him an unearthly confidence. / /I am loved,/ / he finished, unsure of whether that was all he wanted to say, but certain that it was the truth.

*** 

Muscles straining with the effort of not showing weakness, Qui-Gon held himself perfectly still, trying to will away the irritating chafe of the ropes around his ankles that held his legs spread, trying to forget the unnatural position of his arms, wrists lashed tightly together at the nape of his neck and secured there by a rope circling his throat, tight enough so that he could not fully relax without risking cutting off the throb of blood in his throat entirely.

He felt like he had been here forever, bent over the wooden frame that had been alienated from its more peaceful use, stripped and helplessly bound, exposed to the scornful eyes of the many. He heard their voices, subdued murmurs, chattering. There were children among them, he could hear that. He wanted to squirm but thought better of it. It would only hurt, and he needed all his strength. He needed to make Te Awaroa believe he could do this. For his sake.

The murmur of voices rose, then died down completely. Qui-Gon craned his neck as far as he could given his restraints. There was Te Awaroa. Dressed in kilt and cloak, led along by his smugly smiling lover. Ketoa spoke, a calm in his voice that spoke of a sure victory. Qui-Gon tried to catch Te Awaroa's eyes, but could not. The blue eyes were closed, the lips trembling faintly as Ketoa calmly, smugly snaked one hand inside the older man's kilt, evidently to ensure, or bring about, his readiness for the act of public humiliation he was about to commit.

A growled word and one of Te Awaroa's big hands cut him short, surprise and hurt pride evident in his beautiful, almost unmarked face. Shifting the strands of his kilt aside, Te Awaroa bared his proud flushed erection, locking eyes with Qui-Gon. 

/ /For you./ /

A flicker of heat shot through Qui-Gon's entire body and made him shudder. An appreciative murmur rose from the audience. Of course. They must be thinking I'm scared of him. And he's... well, he's big. And hard. And... for me. Hard for me.

/ /I'm sorry, Kuai mine.../ /

/ /Master. Do it. For me./ /

/ /For you./ /

Qui-Gon felt Te Awaroa's big hands settle on his hips, canting them to the perfect angle. He heard him clear his throat, but heard no speech. Instead, a drop of spit fell between his cheeks, slowly making its way towards where the big man's cock was nudging against Qui-Gon's tight entrance already.

/ /I thought that wasn't allowed?/ / The amusement in Qui-Gon's inner voice was tinged with more than a touch of despair, and they both knew it. Then they knew nothing more as Te Awaroa ploughed into Qui-Gon's helpless body in one long thrust.

Oh, it hurt. It hurt more than Qui-Gon had ever imagined. He wasn't quite sure if he had felt something tearing inside him or whether that was just the unbearable burn at being stretched to the limit by his master's cock. Qui-Gon jerked and thrashed in his bonds, trying to expel the intruder buried so deep inside him, trying to work off the pain and the unbelievable energy he felt flooding him... this was as bad as it could get... he would get through this...

/ /...be still... you're good... / /

Te Awaroa groaned at the sound of his lover's voice in his head. Groaned, a thick animal noise of pain and need and sheer lust. This exquisite body, spread out for him, struggling so sweetly, bringing back memories, and he was so tight, so tight and so hot... Te Awaroa howled as he felt the clenched ring of muscle contracting around his cock, then relaxing, fluttering, relaxing again. A wave of brightness hit him, travelling up from where their bodies were joined, setting sparks off in his head. His lover's voice travelled on the light.

/ /...move... enjoy me... take me.../ /

Qui-Gon gasped as the huge cock inside him began to move, almost all the way out, and in again in a savage thrust, tearing at flesh he was desperately trying to relax. He felt as if he was being stuffed, filled with something so big and so hot that he was sure he would burst or melt under the assault, or be torn to shreds, bleeding twitching shreds... 

/ /Oh gods... want you... Kuai... love... love you.../ /

He was spiralling out of control now, thrusts coming harder and faster, drowning Qui-Gon in a red haze of pain and pleasure. Yes, pleasure... he wasn't sure when it had started to register, the insistent rub of Te Awaroa's cock over something hard and needy deep inside him. A pain that wasn't tearing him apart. A pain that demanded more, more pressure, harder thrusts, demanded fierce possession and wild helpless need, a core of lust throbbing in time with the big man's cock pumping in and out of him, tearing him up raw and making him his, his, his... tears streaming from his eyes, Qui-Gon threw his mind open in a wordless scream, letting all his pain and all his love and need flood outward –

The wave of love that hit him in return nearly drowned him. Gasping for breath, Qui-Gon struggled in his bonds, trying desperately to take it all in, to swallow all that love and compassion and lust and never let it go again, to take it all in, to rock back on the cock that speared him, begging for more, begging to be released from holding it all in...

The walls broke down the second he felt the splash of wet heat deep inside him. The wild thrusts continued for a while, as if their bodies refused to be parted, but Qui-Gon's mind was no longer with his body. It had dissolved into a bright stream of tears and seed, flowed from his mouth in a desperate scream. It had met Te Awaroa's somewhere along the way. The man was water, and he drank and drowned greedily.

*** 

Panting, black spots dancing before his eyes, Qui-Gon winced as he felt the big cock withdraw from him. Something warm trickled down the inside of his thigh. He didn't have to look to see it was red. He also didn't have to look to see the small stain of his own seed on the ground. Nor did he have to look to see, very clearly, the thunderous scowl on Ketoa's face.

/ /The words, mine. Say.../ /

Drawing as much breath as he could, Qui-Gon raised his head a little. His voice was unnaturally calm as he spoke.

"Mihi atu, matua."

/ /Thank _you_ , Kuai mine,/ / the warm voice in his head echoed. 

Distantly, he felt himself being cut free and hoisted to his feet by several hands. Distantly, he heard Ketoa's voice proclaiming the Taking performed. Distantly, he heard the appreciative murmur of the people.

All he had eyes for was Te Awaroa. The deep clouded blue of his eyes, and the track of a single tear across the tattooed cheek.

/ /How are you feeling, love?/ / And the voice, oh, the deep rumbling voice he just wanted to crawl inside...

Shifting his weight on to one foot, Qui-Gon attempted a smile.

/ /Like I've sat on a piece of sky./ /


	14. (In which more than just a flightless bird gets caught)

The hunters had brought home shouts that could be heard a long way off, and by the time Qui-Gon had put away his work and come out of the house to have a look, he was already having to negotiate a path through a throng of excited women and children babbling and pointing at the unusual prey.

"He moooooa!" crowed a tiny boy, clearly pleased with himself for being able to name the huge beast that was lying on the ground in front of one of the houses, still bleeding but most definitely killed.

/ /There's not that many of them around any more these days,/ / a quiet voice insinuated himself into the back of Qui-Gon's mind. Casting his eyes about, he found Te Awaroa in the crowd, or rather above the crowd, a proud warrior smile on his face, looked up to by the hunters. 

/ /Too much hunting?/ /

/ /Too much good meat, mine. You'll see,/ / came the amused reply.

The beast was huge, the size of two men, and covered in straggly long fur. From under its massive rump Qui-Gon could see two clawed legs protruding, hairless from the knee to the huge thick-skinned claw. At the other end, the animal's neck lay on the ground like a snake, bent at an unnatural angle where it had probably been broken in transport. The head was small, with two black beady eyes and... a beak? This monster creature was a bird? The fur was... feathers?

/ /He moa?/ / he endeavoured, puzzled. / /This is some kind of bird?/ /

/ /This is _the_ bird, Kuai mine./ /

/ /But... it doesn't have wings, does it?/ /

/ /It does have wings.... but fly it doesn't. Whereas you, mine, manage the opposite quite easily./ /

Qui-Gon distinctly began to wish for a facial tattoo to hide his constant blush.

*** 

It did have wings, rather small and skinny affairs that looked utterly pitiful once they had torn its feathers off in large handfuls and piled them aside for making cloaks. They were working quickly and efficiently, Qui-Gon having gained a small measure of respect among the other slaves and the younger women who helped out. They spoke to him now, even though he still didn't understand much more than a few words of their tongue. But they spoke to him now, like he was a fellow human, if only a slave. It made work a lot easier, and they had to get this monster cooked in time for the feast after nightfall...

*** 

Qui-Gon burped delicately as he slipped under his master's feathered cloak with him, curling up comfortably against the warm body. As a slave, he had only been given pieces of the moa's skin, which had however been quite filling in themselves. And nobody had dared protest when Te Awaroa hand-fed his 'pet' (that was the meaning of the strange word Ketoa had called him by, he had learnt. Mokai, or pet) choice pieces of succulent meat from the huge bird's thigh.

Life was good right now. The tearing in his anus was almost healed, and it wasn't like he and Te Awaroa hadn't slipped behind a bush here and there to indulge in less intrusive kinds of lovemaking throughout the last week or so. And the big man was a fast learner when it came to kissing too...

As if our bodies knew better, he thought, relishing the contrast between the springy mattress of fern and rushes and the firm warmth of his master's flesh. His lover's flesh. He had missed the transition when the one became the other, and could not find it in himself to find that worrying, or even odd. Our bodies knew better, he thought. Just took over the thinking... not that his brain was the most reliable of allies these days, and he had no way of telling if it had ever been, really. All he'd taken with him was this flesh, and the pull of the Force, the pull that drew him towards this man who owned him, overwhelmed him like a force of nature. And loved him. Inexplicably loved him.

Wrapping himself around his gently snoring master, Qui-Gon began to wonder whether his home truly was where he had come from.

*** 

"All right, all right, all right. So what you're saying is, you're cowards."

The accusing glare lit up the house far more satisfactorily than the lone piece of kindling burning on the flat stone in their midst. The men fidgeted uneasily, knowing full well that there was a grain of truth in what Ketoa had said. Finally, one of them, a cloakless short-haired elder with a pale scar slashed across the elaborate lines of his forehead tattoo, spoke up.

"What we are objecting to, Ketoa, is not your feelings. It is not just your will that we are refusing. To do this would bring shame and wrath on all of us. It simply is not right in the way of the gods, not right in the way of the people of the Great Water, and you know that perfectly well."

An appreciative murmur rose from the assembled faces, stilled quickly by a glare from Ketoa. 

"You are too cowardly to dispose of a mere plainface? A _slave_ , worth nothing more than the dogs trailing at your heels? You, Matangi, you who speak so eloquently of the way of the gods," he snorted derisively, "when has the way of the gods ever kept you from easily killing an enemy, back in the days when we still gloried in wars? Remember who you were, Matangi. Remember your pride. Remember that you _will_ be remembered in the name of our tribe, as a great leader, as a great ancestor, for what you did then. The Ngati Matangi! That is the way of the gods, not this cowering! Look at me, I am not afraid of him, not the gods, it's him you are afraid of, and I am young and inexperienced compared to you. When have you ever been afraid, Te Matangi, of a man who is comparable to you in every way, and so much your junior, so much an upstart who has risen through your goodwill and his own stubbornness? Risen to high esteem, oh I can read that in your face, Te Matangi, risen to prestige and _mana_. But when has _mana_ ever extended to a slave? When has the way of the gods ever kept you from killing a dog?"

"That is not what we are talking about, and you know it," Te Matangi replied, falling silent for a moment to gather his thoughts. Ketoa was nothing if not good with words, and far from easy to convince.

Another of the men came to his aid, a slender young man with a feather in his topknot and half the tattoo still missing from his delicate features. 

"He is one of us, Ketoa. That would be like killing someone's child, someone's brother. He was made one of us though the rite. It was the _ariki_ that..."

Ketoa cut him off, impatient, eyes glittering fiercely. "And who's afraid of the ariki, eh? Do the old wives' tales scare you, eh? Witch powers! Sky-blue eyes! I would have thought you men enough to see him for what he is – just a man like you. But oh, you're _afraid_ of him. Fine warriors you are."

He let the barb sink in, enjoying the fidgeting, the downturned faces. "Suppose I gave in to your small-mindedness then. Suppose we do not kill him. Suppose we let nature do the killing. We only help her along. Karihima, what say you – how long do you think he would last without water or food, left to his own devices out in the wild, unable to free himself? A day? Two?"

The man called Karihima, a big burly fellow with receding hair, joined in the uneasy laughter. "Two days at best, Ketoa. Look at him – hardly any flesh on him. Thin as a twig, and just as easy to snap."

Te Matangi cut in again, and all faces turned towards him. "Consider this, though. This boy has powers. Let us disregard for the moment the colour of his eyes. But did you see how he bore up against the Rite? How he took _pleasure_ from the pain? Without even being touched? How can you be sure that such a man would not free himself in an instant and come back to wreak his just revenge on you and all yours?"

"Witchpowers again," Ketoa sneered, more than a little galled when Te Matangi withstood his scornful glare. "Do you not think my own powers are far more subtle, and far more real besides, than those mysterious powers Te Awaroa is rumoured to have fucked into his pet? Let me take care of that – we will not kill him, and no god will find a reason to avenge him for what we're doing to him. In fact, he will die in a slow haze of twisted pleasure. I can count on you?"

Heads nodded slowly, voices murmured assent. Even Rangirua smiled a slow smile of approval at Ketoa. Only Te Matangi remained silent, knowing he was defeated.

*** 

It was far too early to be awake yet... and yet he squirmed happily in his lover's embrace, nuzzling into the hair that brushed across his face, rubbing against the hands that held him down. If this was a dream, it was a good one, and if not... he loved waking up to Te Awaroa's insistent attentions, and nothing got the blood flowing like a good hard pounding first thing in the morning... a hand stroked his cheek, and Qui-Gon licked his lips. Mmh, he would suckle those fingers, get them good and wet, and then...

His eyes flew open as the hand clamped over his mouth, stifling a scream. Who – what – an unfamiliar face scowled down at him from behind a curtain of tousled hair. He twisted in order to dislodge the hand from his face, and found himself in the grip of more hands, holding him down everywhere. Rolling his eyes madly, he failed to see his master anywhere... and another hand was slowly snaking towards his nose...

Words. Soothing murmur with more than an edge of sneer to them. He could well imagine what they were saying. Calling him 'pet', urging him to open his mouth as the hand pinched his nose shut. Clenching his teeth, he tried to breathe through his mouth, through the dirty warm fingers, around the hands pressing down on his throat menacingly, breathe, gather enough breath to scream... before he could, he found his mouth invaded by another hand, nails clawing at his gums. With a small yelp of pain, he opened his mouth – only to find it filled with a sharp-tasting thick liquid. A hand snapped his jaw shut and bent his head back, forcing him to swallow, past where the other hand was still near-choking him, promising to go all the way. The voice sounded pleased, and the face retreated. 

Another loomed into view, and a heel connected solidly with his stomach. The face faded, along with the light.

*** 

It was far too early to be awake yet... and yet he squirmed happily in his lover's embrace, wriggling slightly to dislodge an arm from where it had been lying for too long, cutting off his circulation. He was warm, and a little uncomfortable, and... horny. Hazy. He stretched, feeling dozens of little aches spearing through his body. His eyes felt gummed up, and he opened them with more than a little effort. He looked down on himself.

Down?

He was standing up?

His head snapped up, only to connect solidly with something hard. He tried to rub his eyes, only to find he couldn't. His hands weren't where he expected them to be. 

His hands were... bound. Secured to the branches of some tree, coarse ropes cutting into his skin. He shook his head and felt a loose end of rope brushing his nipple, sending excruciating sensations through his helpless body. There was... he swallowed. Rope around his neck too. His upper arms. Suspended. Ankles. Spread. He looked down, and his gaze stuck on his most evidently aroused cock, bobbing in the air, hungry, demanding to be touched. A throb almost painful... it didn't make sense...

Shaking his head as if to clear his sight, Qui-Gon looked down again. The painful throb was on his right hip, there where the thin trickle of blood was oozing from the fresh cut... blood and something else.

Black dye.


	15. (In which Te Awaroa goes in search of Qui-Gon, and Qui-Gon finds himself, somewhere)

As fast as his feet would carry him. He had nothing to go by but a vague idea that something was amiss, and nothing for direction save for the fact that he was most certainly in the wrong place. It was not so much words he had in his mind, not even the faint aftertaste of words that he usually got when he listened to Kuai. It had been sort of like the intake of breath you hear before the words start pouring out. Only there weren't any words. The breath had been cut off before it could form words, and the emptiness in his mind echoed uncomfortably. Kuai?

Scattering dogs, fowl and small children in his wake, Te Awaroa sprinted across the village towards his house as fast as he could, caring little for the bewildered stares the dogs, fowl and small children bestowed on him. Caring little for anything in his way as long it had sense enough to move out of his way.

Only it didn't, and he literally ran right into it. It gave a slight 'oof', then turned a rather miffed face up towards Te Awaroa.

"What ails you, husband, that you're running around like a man chased by ghosts at this early hour?" Ketoa, one eyebrow raised, rubbing his not-quite-bruised shoulder with an exaggerated gesture that only served to heighten the chief's impatience.

"I'm up no earlier than you are," a deep breath. "There's something wrong with Kuai."

"Oh, Kuai." Shoulders relaxed ostentatiously, and Te Awaroa might have heard a carefully studied long-suffering sigh if he'd managed to calm his own laboured breathing for a moment. "Is that why you're running around the place all of a sudden? To impress your new pet? If you'd take advice from me..."

"Cut it!" Te Awaroa was clearly in no mood to banter, and Ketoa's indelible smile wavered a little as the big man made to shoulder past him.

"Forgive me, husband." That smile again, unseen as the chief dove into the low doorway of his house. It was empty of course, and the smile was in place as Te Awaroa emerged out of the dim little space, clearly disturbed and scanning the surroundings for a sign of his slave. "But what makes you think he is in distress?"

"He's not here, that's what," Te Awaroa replied gruffly, wanting nothing more than to swat his annoying companion away like the carrion-fly that he was being. He was not about to tell Ketoa that Kuai's every thought was more of an open book to him than the carefully contrived gestures with which his high-born husband deigned to show what passed for his affection.

"Oh, so he's not here." Ketoa nodded, slowly. "And that worries you? Has he run away, your dear boy? Well, I would catch you another if there was a war on, you know, but honestly I don't think for a moment you need another. In fact, I don't think you needed this one in the first place. You and your fondness for pathetic creatures... quite endearing, really."

Te Awaroa swiped angrily at the hand that had settled on his cheek, clearly not in the mood for the kind of cold comfort Ketoa was offering.

"Leave it. I'm going to look for him."

"Look for him? Aroha, you're not thinking. For a slave? What use would he be for you if you'd catch him again? You'd have to kill him in punishment. And that's not worth the bother now, is it?"

"He would not run away, Ketoa. He just would not."

"Oh, so sure of that, are we? Well, let me see... he could have been eaten by a _taniwha_... though the nearest body of water large enough to support one is quite a while away, and I doubt the little pup has that sort of determination. Or he could have run across a war party," his face brightened up at this rather more plausible explanation, "and got killed out of caution."

Te Awaroa's patience was wearing thin, and it was showing in his voice. "You know as well as I do that there are no war parties around these lands, and there haven't been for years," he ground out.

Ketoa danced back a step, body language carefully honed to make it look to everyone as if he was the one being unjustly intimidated by the big chief. His back already turned to retreat, he threw one last retort over his shoulder, letting the barb sink in.

"I know as well as you do that the ways of the Ngati Mura are unpredictable."

*** 

The Ngati Mura. People of the flame, though the flame of their ancestor Te Mura had gone out centuries ago, and they had had little but afterglow to go on ever since. Haughtiness ran in the family with them, and beauty. And both had impressed Te Awaroa greatly, back when he had been a young warrior of nondescript ancestry, risen to some measure of fame through fearless deeds in battle, and sheer size. And his blue eyes.

He still suspected it had been his blue eyes that had impressed her more than any of his deeds in the field. And when Te Matangi, the senior _rangatira_ of the Ngati Wainui, had abdicated his rank as battle leader of the tribe and handed worldly power to the young blue-eyed upstart, he had suddenly found himself the most desirable bachelor in all of Aotearoa. With a rather ardent admirer already. She who had spotted his blue eyes first.

And she came with all the graces of the Ngati Mura. Fiery, haughty, and quite beautiful. Stubborn, though there wasn't much outstubborning to do once the man she had designs on had been elevated overnight to _ariki_ of a minor but nevertheless rising tribe. Her parents had assented, Te Matangi had nodded wisely, and she had fixed her sparkly dark brown eyes on him and not let go.

At least not until she found that staying married to Te Awaroa was not as much fun as getting married to Te Awaroa.

*** 

The taste in his mouth was awful, a wretched bitterness that stung deep in his throat. Screwing his eyes shut, Qui-Gon concentrated on working up some spit to get rid of it, and winced when the drop of spittle hit his painfully aroused flesh.

What on whatever this planet was called had happened to him?

What... whatever had just made him think that? Planet? Spinning around... His head was spinning rather faster than he would have liked, and he was dimly certain that it would have fallen off long ago if it wasn't tethered to the tree by the coarse rope around his neck.

Oh. Tree. Rope. Lots of rope, artlessly criss-crossed all over his body and the tree's trunk. He writhed experimentally to see if it would get him anywhere, and moaned as all it got him was that frayed end swinging across his nipple once more, setting the little nub on fire. This would feel so... good... if he wasn't tied up. Actually, he thought more than a shade hazily, this might even feel good if I was tied up, as long as it was _by_ someone. 

Someone. Just a hand, just a fingertip. He felt his skin thirsting for touch, squirmed against the bonds some more. Good... if only...

He stared down at his right hand numbly. It was almost free to move around, held only by a pair of long ropes leading outside his immediate field of vision. The only problem was that it couldn't actually move anywhere useful. Like, to another piece of rope to tug on it. Or to a knot to untie it. Or to his throbbing hardness to... touch it... he squirmed some more, telling himself it was just to get a feel of how best to get free of these bonds, to work some slack into these graceless unyielding ropes that held him tighter than any lover had... tighter and harder than... his... hands...

Letting his eyes slide shut, Qui-Gon gave in to the flood of sensations his overheated skin and addled mind were pumping into him. His hands, his wondrous savage lover's big rough hands, hands he longed to feel all over him, holding him down for a rough delicious taking, touching, groping, scratching all over as he was pounded into a screaming quivering pulp, barely catching his breath before whimpering for more, more of these rough touches, more of this hard wild love, more, just more, more...

It was his own hoarse scream that jerked him back to reality, a dirty reality. A reality that had bitter saliva dripping from the corner of his mouth, cloudy semen dripping from the tip of his still angry-red cock, and smudged black dye running from a painful spot on his hip. A reality that had no hands in it, at least none that could do anything useful. A reality that hurt, and that was full of holes. 

Breathe, Padawan, he told himself. You do not have his hands. You do not have your own hands. You have the marks of someone else's hands on you. But they are obviously not around, or else your scream would have roused them. You are alone.

Carefully, he bent his head as far forward as the rope around his neck would allow, and eyed the wound on his hip. The streaks of black dye that he had seen running all the way down to his knee were mingled with blood further up, blood that was still seeping from a series of random deep smooth-edged cuts that looked much deeper than they had felt. He could see the surprising whiteness of his own flesh in the depths of the cuts, there where the blood had already drained and the black dye hadn't penetrated. The wounds stung, but the pain was bearable, the cuts too clean to cause the agony he had come to associate with being wounded (had he been wounded before? He filed the thought away for future reference, attaching the thread of stray thought to the white ends of the cuts in his skin). 

Almost as if he had been cut not to wound, but to mark. And marked he would be, even if the scars would be barely visible. They would be black.

Ketoa. The thought struck him out of the blue, out of the white and red and black of his skin, at skin-level, before his mind had even caught up with why he was where he was. Ketoa. The tattoo-master. Master. He snorted at the thought, remembering with unbidden clarity that the word used to be reserved for someone he would have treated with respect, a sober grey-haired man.

Master? His master was Te Awaroa, wasn't he? His master, his chief, his lover. His beautiful savage lover... Qui-Gon fought down another wave of arousal as his treacherous body responded to the mere thought of the man's big hard body and his greedy warm mouth and... think, Qui. Think.

Te Awaroa. At least think _at_ him if you can't bloody free yourself, Padawan. Closing his eyes and breathing deeply, willing his nipples not to register the coarse touch of the rope, he concentrated on his master's name, on the sound of his voice as he had said it, on the fact that Qui-Gon still had not the faintest idea what the name meant. Te Awaroa. Te Awaroa. Te Awaroa. 

It wormed itself into his mind like a corkscrew mantra, going deeper than he had dared hope. On some level, he felt the connection working, felt the tiny seed of something living in him, something that was not his mind but another's. Te Awaroa's, he hoped. Master's mind. Just as before... just like when he had been... the word eluded him. But the implications did not.

Focusing his faltering, chanting mind on the bindings around his right wrist, Qui-Gon tentatively brought the Force to bear on the knots.

Reluctantly, they began to unravel.


	16. (In which Qui-Gon goes in search of Te Awaroa, and Te Awaroa finds... )

"Coming home to rest, husband mine?" The smirk on Ketoa's smooth face was quite enough to make Te Awaroa turn away in disgust. Without a word, he turned and walked out into the wilderness again.

The damp dark forest that had lured and mocked him all day with the scent of his Kuai would shelter him for another night, he was certain. And the ferns felt more welcoming than the icy smile of his husband.

*** 

He awoke long before dawn, the cold damp in his hair reminding him of his age, and the bitter taste in his mouth reminding him that he probably hadn't eaten all day yesterday. In the dim grey light of the moon, with the sun still struggling his way up through Maui's net far off to the east, he felt old indeed, and a little foolish, his search futile. Maybe the boy had run away, had feigned all his love and trust so that he could escape in one of his many unguarded moments?

Te Awaroa closed his eyes. And there, in the warm red behind his eyelids, was the boy's face. Smooth, pale. That pink mouth, and impossibly blue eyes. No. These eyes could not be deceitful. They just weren't. He saw it, behind his eyelids, and he heard it where words had no meaning. And he kept on hearing it, at the edge of his mind. Kuai was alive. He was not running. Where would the boy run to?

He would run to him. Rubbing his eyes until the dancing bright patterns outshone the dim pre-dawn light, Te Awaroa concentrated on the sounds at the edge of his inner eye. It didn't make sense, but it made sensation. Glimpses of the boy running, running towards him. 

"Tae mai, Kuai, tae mai." As much a reminder to himself as a prayer, the words seeped into the dawn chorus of the awakening wilderness.

*** 

Qui-Gon's neck ached slightly from having slept on his back all night. It was just past dawn, and something had woken him up. Sitting up gingerly, he listened for anything unusual beyond the din of cicadas and birds that was already filling every available space in the canopy overhead.

Carefully, he peeled away the wilted leaf from where he had draped it over his wound. Well, at least it hadn't become infected. Yet. There was no way of telling what would happen if he did turn in his sleep one night and came into contact with the ground though. The ground looked very much alive here. 

He stretched his arms and shoulders, working out the kinks, then rose to relieve himself against a convenient bush. At least the arousal had faded, he noted with a degree of satisfaction. Not that he minded arousal as such, but... this had clearly been the after-effect of whatever he had been dosed with before he had been brought here. And having a clear mind was a definite advantage when stranded in an alien wilderness with little sense of direction beyond 'up' and 'down'.

First things first. Picking up the coil of rope he had salvaged from his unravelled bonds, Qui-Gon carefully wrapped one around his waist like a belt, tying it in front, then a shorter one around the top of his thigh, tight enough to stay in place, but loose enough not to impede him. Another pair of large leaves threaded underneath these two ropes served to cover his still-oozing wound while he was walking. And walking was what he would be doing, regardless of the fact that he had no idea which way to go. 

From some point onwards, keeping going was more important than going anywhere, and Qui-Gon was sure that he was at or past that point. He was also sure he was thirsty, and could not remember when he had last eaten. Walking was what he would be doing.

Slowly, as if to make sure his wound wasn't about to erupt into agony and his head wasn't about to erupt into another spontaneous faint, he followed his own feet.

Te Awaroa, he thought as the rhythm of his overly long legs took possession of his body. Te Awaroa, Te Awaroa, Te Awaroa.

*** 

Te Awaroa ate in passing, berries and hard, unripe fruit, like a thief, like an outcast. Like the unarmed wanderer that he was, eating only because his memory told him he should. If his enemies could see him now, he would be done for. Hells, if his own tribesmen could see him now, they would doubt his sanity. 

He could not find it in himself to care for his enemies, or his tribesmen. Nor for his sanity. He knew where his sanity lay. It lay somewhere in this forest, in the body of a thin tall pale boy. Alive. It taunted him, dragged him on, deeper into the bush, further up the hills. This was Ngati Mura land, he was fairly sure. He had not been here for years. He had had no reason to. Hunting was not good here. 

Hunting, now, was the best thing he had. 

*** 

The water was cool and refreshing, loud in Qui-Gon's ears and bright on his hands, washing away the grime that a day's worth of holding on had left on his skin. Holding on to steady himself on the treacherous ground, holding on to hope and the song of something at the back of his mind. It was darker again than he would have liked, the sun was disappearing behind the slope he had been wandering along for the best part of the day already, and he felt exhausted. No, he felt sleepy. His body was worn into comfortable heavy-limbed tiredness, but his mind refused to give in. Something nagged him on, and it was not the growl in his stomach. 

It did not nag him on in any particular direction though, just... on. Forward, ahead. Into tomorrow. Tomorrow felt right, felt as clear as the older yesterdays felt hazy.

Tomorrow. Tomorrow could be reached very, very easily. Tearing off some of the thick fern fronds in the failing light, Qui-Gon let himself drop into a heavy, dreamless sleep.

*** 

Te Awaroa had set off long before dawn again, following his sense of... scent, he supposed, again. The scent that was beyond his nostrils, deeper in his head, where Kuai sat. Not the memory of Kuai. He was still very much there in his head. 

The tail end of the night was the best time to go in search of something. No light to dazzle the eye, no noise to fill the ear. And, he had to admit to himself, sleep was not coming easily anyway. Not now that the forest smelled of Kuai, pulsed with something soft and dull under his skin the higher he climbed. If anything, he would see the sunrise from the ridge of the hills, as he had not done for years.

He did not get that far. 

Curled up in a nest of ruffled fern, the faintly awkward white curve of Kuai's sleeping form made his heart leap.


	17. (In which the world is made yet again, and marks are obscured)

"And how are we feeling this morning, my young warrior?" The faint strain of tension in Ketoa's overly-bright voice went completely unnoticed as a noncommittal grunt from under the eaves of the house answered him. Rangirua was clearly in no mood to talk.

Which was forgivable given the state of his face – a few days after his second session under Ketoa's deft hands and sharp chisel, his left cheek was a swollen mass of black-edged swirls cutting deeply into too-soft flesh. His eye was nearly swollen shut, and his pout was lopsided as he greeted Ketoa with the slightest nod, reclining back against the wall as soon as common courtesy allowed.

"Ah, ah. Not looking too bad. You've been very brave so far, you know? I would be tempted to say you're the perfect image of your father in this, but... he seems to tend towards foolishness these days..."

"... jjus' shut up about my father, 'lease..."

"I will, I will." An indulgent smile, a hand attempting to stroke a cheek that twitched away from the touch. Ketoa settled his hand on the stricken boy's shoulder instead. "I can imagine what it must be like to live with someone like that. And I've only tried for, oh, seven years...? Still, a better track record than my predecessor, I imagine..."

A glare from Rangirua told him in no uncertain terms that jests were not welcome. Especially not jests about his family.

"Oh, forgive me. I am hardly in a position to joke about someone I have barely known. As little as you have, I would think... she wasn't with us for very long. No, she wasn't."

"Ran 'way when I was born... lef' me everyone's son..."

"Oh Rangirua, no. You mustn't think that." Quick fluttering pats on the boy's shoulder, slowing down to a gentle stroke. "You mustn't think that. You are very much your father's son... as well as your mother's," he added quickly. 

Rangirua would have spat if he had felt capable of doing so without drooling on himself. 

"Ran 'way an' never came back..." The glare in his brown eyes was as much disappointment as anger.

"Rangirua. Boy. What you are is precious. It is you. You do not have to have your parents holding your hand to make you precious. Look at all the people of the village – all the aunts and uncles, grandmothers and stepbrothers. Have they not taken you for who you are? Without asking where your mother is and why she's not holding your hand?" He stared into the dim cobwebbed space under the eaves for a moment, if only to avoid staring into Rangirua's eyes and the doubt so evident there.

"Tell me again," he said brightly, "how the world was made."

Rangirua snorted. "'mnot a baby, Ketoa."

"That, Rangirua, is precisely the point." An indulgent smile. "Oh, silly me, I had nearly forgotten." With an elegant gesture, Ketoa produced a small package wrapped in _harakeke_ leaves from under his cloak. "I acknowledge you are not a baby, Rangirua, but I will have to feed you nevertheless. Rest assured that I have fed great chieftains in this manner, and that I have no doubt you will be one before I'm too old to do this kind of thing to grown men like you." He unfolded the package and, with practised ease, began to finger-feed the sulking boy. "Now, how was the world made?"

Rangirua sighed. "Firs', there was Nothing, and it was called Te Kore..."

Ketoa smiled. "Too true. And I trust you to have learned your mythology well, dear boy. But answer me my question: how was the world," he gestured at the village at large with one finger smeared in _kumara_ pulp, "how was the world we live in, the world we see, made?"

Rangirua looked puzzled. "There was... Papata...," he winced at the amount of facial movement the name of the Earth Mother required, "Papa...tuanuku. And she had married her b'loved, Ranginui, the sky, who lay with 'er. An' they had many children, six great _atua_ they had, and they lived b'tween them..." Rangirua paused to accept another dollop of food, and Ketoa used the pause to take over.

"And yet the world was not as we see it today when Ranginui lay with Papatuanuku, now was it?"

Rangirua shook his head slowly, carefully. "'ws dark between 'em. No light."

"And quite stuffy it must have been too," Ketoa added good-naturedly, eliciting a small smile from the boy's ravaged face. "So...?"

"Tane. Tane came an' pushed with his feet un'il Ranginui popped free of Papatu...'nuku. An' there was light, an' Tane became the big tree that' keeps the sky above our 'eads." Clearly exhausted from such a long sentence, Rangirua let his head flop back against the wall again. Ketoa smiled.

"So. That's reassuring, is it not?"

Rangirua frowned with some effort. "So?"

"Think on it, my young warrior. Where would we be if Tane hadn't pushed his parents apart? You, my boy, have quite the promise to be such a tree. It's in you, trust you me. And as the earth may be far from the tree's canopy, and the sky may be frowning and thundering upon him and throwing storm and lightning at him – has that ever brought the tree Tane down? Has the sky fallen on our heads? It hasn't."

Rangirua just stared, processing what Ketoa had just said, trying to understand.

Ketoa smiled. "Your mother may be far from your head, but you are rooted in her still. And your father may be frowning upon you, but that will not bring you down. You are not your father, Rangirua. You are your own man. And you will stand as tall as the tree Tane one day, if only you allow yourself to do so. I see that in you, Rangirua. I see the great chief you will one day be. Do you see it too?"

Without a word, the boy picked up the hand that lay on his shoulder and pressed it to his bloodstained lips.

The faint flicker of disgust on Ketoa's face was too brief to register in Rangirua's glistening eyes.

*** 

"Kuai."

The voice in his ear was too close, too warm, and he squirmed away from it involuntarily, unwilling to wake up enough to find it was only a dream. The fern was tickling the back of his neck and he realised dimly that he had slept on his side, on his injured side no less. Peeling open his eyes, he rolled over on his back.

And collided with something very solid and warm.

The warm and solid something wrapped itself around him, and Qui-Gon found himself staring into a pair of blue eyes surrounded by laugh-lines and frown-lines and so so many thin black lines carved into the broad face... a face he was covering in kisses before his mind had even registered the enormity of being surrounded by the very real presence of Te Awaroa.

The next hours were a blur, a blur of hands and mouths and urgent minds slamming against each other as their bodies did, needing to be closer, closer than their skins allowed, needing to dive into each other. Moments of frenzied tearing at each other's flesh, feeding on each other's mouths, followed by quiet hours curled up in the dishevelled nest of fern fronds, sharing what little they knew of what had happened. 

Qui-Gon lifted the makeshift bandage on his hip to show Te Awaroa his wound, and the grim nod that the man gave at the sight of the blackened cuts was enough for Qui-Gon to see his suspicion confirmed. 

/ / We must be very careful, mine. / /

/ / I am not afraid. Not when you're with me, matua. / /

Te Awaroa smiled at the title. / / I will make a point of not leaving your side, Kuai mine. / / He laid a hand on Qui-Gon's side, just above where the cuts were beginning to heal into a haphazard arrangement of scars. / / Especially not this side. / /

Qui-Gon reached up a finger to trail it over his lover's soft black lips. / /You have changed too, matua. Though not as permanently as I have, I fear. / /

/ / What... oh. / / The chief grinned as his slave's fingers trailed over the thick stubble on his chin and cheeks. / / I have grown so used to you... I could not bear the thought of shaving or plucking without your hands on me. / /

/ / I, on the other hand, could grow used to this.../ / Qui-Gon lavished an extravagant kiss on Te Awaroa's entire lower face. / / Quite an exciting sensation. And it makes you look... fierce./ /

/ / Fierce, eh? / /

Qui-Gon squirmed in wild laughter as his fierce master held him down to give him a gentle but insistent tickling.

*** 

They made no haste in returning to the village, stopping every now and then to feed their growling stomachs and their purring desires. By the time they had found their way to within sight of the village's dying fireplaces, it was near midnight again, Qui-Gon's mouth was stained from a rich dinner of wild berries and wilder kisses, and Te Awaroa had been talked into keeping at least part of his newly-grown beard. Just around the mouth, Qui-Gon had said, because trust me, it feels wonderful. And maybe along the jaw... that way, I still get to spoil you by plucking your cheeks, and the wonderful spiral down there won't be half-obscured.

You forget who put that spiral there, Te Awaroa had said, earnestly.

I don't care, Qui-Gon had said, reaching up for another kiss. It's you, and I'll have you any flavour I can get you. Drink you, he added to himself, drink you like a man about to die of thirst. 

This was where he belonged.

*** 

They arrived back at the village to remarkably little uproar. That may have been because the uproar was all about what young Whitireka had seen earlier that day when she'd been out gathering berries in the wetlands by the sea. About what Whitireka claimed she had seen anyway – the village was not yet quite of one opinion as to whether to believe a girl of questionable truthfulness and definite thirteen years of age whose one defining characteristic was a desire to impress the young men of the tribe, Rangirua chief among them.

What she had claimed to see was a canoeful of _patupaiarehe_ , the ghosts of the netherworld, with their bone-white skin and bright red hair and red eyes. What exactly they had been doing out in the middle of the day, and in a canoe at that, was not entirely evident from Whitireka's account, but the mere fact that they had allowed themselves to be seen by a mere careless girl calmed even the more timid souls into believing that this must have been a very stupid bunch of _patupaiarehe_ indeed, if they weren't figments of Whitireka's imagination to start with.

Such were the things that kept the village gossips happy as they sat around the cooking fires in the early dusk, and the fact that the chief was back, and had found his slave, was merely taken as an everyday event. After all, Te Awaroa could hardly go out and hunt for something or someone and not come back victorious. That was unheard of, and consequently unspoken of.

The fact that he had grown a beard went uncommented by all but the most bored of teenagers, and the fact that he made a point of always having one hand on his slave's right hip in public was universally seen as a mark of possession, and was quite favourably commented on by those who had seen how well said slave had stood up under the ritual Taking. 

Only one fire heard gossip of another kind. Only two pairs of eyes were gazing into the flames there, a small fire slowly turning _kauri_ resin into the finest blackest soot, the prime tool of the tattoo-master's trade.

As his markings on Te Awaroa were being obscured by that abomination of a beard, and his markings on his detestable slave were being obscured by the man's misguided affection, his markings on Rangirua's face grew to a new level of perfection.

Ketoa would not be disregarded.


	18. (In which Qui-Gon writes, and is renamed yet again)

It was still the same piece of rope, and it still did its job admirably well, holding up the long blade-like _harakeke_ leaf against the centre post of Te Awaroa's house. Qui-Gon stood contemplating the waxy green surface for a few moments, hefting the broken seashell in his hand, gathering his thoughts.

Carefully, he made the incisions. Master, he wrote, frowning at the clumsiness of his hand, knowing from having watched the women at it that the cuts would wither into thin yellowish lines on the surface of the stringy leaf. It would serve as his book for the time being. It would serve as his memory.

Master, it said. What did he remember of Master? 

Master was a sober grey-haired man. Master was a stern voice, a man of many talents. Master was... a teacher. Not an owner? Qui-Gon closed his eyes, shutting out the sight of Te Awaroa's hut and his place in it. Not that he could shut out the scent of Te Awaroa's skin infusing the very air he breathed... concentrate, Padawan.

Padawan. He carved the word underneath 'Master'. Master - Padawan. It seemed right. Padawan meant him, that much he recalled. So it meant obedience. Learning. He recalled Master being a man widely admired for... his art, his mind lamely supplied. He had no clear idea of what it was he had been learning before he came here. Sure as hells he did not remember any of it now. All he remembered was the learning, and the following. At Master's shoulder. A swirl of brown caught his mental eye. He looked down his awkward tall body and recalled what he had been wearing when he had found himself here. Trousers of some kind, pale beige and rather comfortable. 

Clothes, he put down, hoping that the word would remind him of more as it would wither into brownish yellow on the matte green leaf.

Looking down had made his eyes catch yet again on the scars on his hip, still raised and reddened, but beginning to heal. They were itching, and he contemplated the white edges where old skin was dying and withering to make way for new red flesh. There had been something attached to these white bits. Some memory. Of older wounds. 

He had been wounded before? A Learner who had suffered wounds. Wounds, he put down, gazing indecisively at the word. He did not recall blood, nor malice. It was not Master who inflicted the wounds, then. It was – something beyond his grasp just yet. Wounds, he thought, I remember being wounded, but no blood. And I have no scars worth mentioning. Someone must have taken care of me. Master, maybe.

Words were running out. This seemed all his memory had on offer. Four scant words with hazy images behind them, and one word that meant nothing as yet.

Llipe, he wrote, hoping against hope that seeing the unattached word before his eyes would make him recall what it stood for. It had leapt at him out of his crowded mind long ago, and not come back since. It nagged him, but every time he tried to concentrate on the concept behind the word, it faded and was replaced by the image that Te Awaroa had first sent into his mind. All he could see when he sought 'Llipe', was 'hine', the grinning dark-skinned girl with the markings of the tribe on her chin, the one-of-many. One of many, he thought, maybe that's what it stands for. He had been one of something, something that described all of him, all of his position in this world, something he had with him wherever he was. 

Wherever. He slapped his forehead. Planet. That was what had popped into his mind the other day as he had found himself tied to that tree. Planet was... it was... Planet was away, not away like the land of the Ngati Mura. Not away like the islands. Planet was away across the sky. One of many. One of many again. Something he knew of, hazily but deeply. Planet was what he believed in, apparently. Planet was where he was from, where he was one of many, where he was whatever described all of him, this one word that bound up all he was, much more so than his own little name, Qui-Gon, or Kuai - what did it matter as long as the word eluded him. The word that held him and the many and the Master and the wounds and the learning and the... force. The Force, as he had instinctively called it, as if it didn't want to be named.

The Force, he wrote, and 'Planet' underneath it, lest he forget. 

Though the Force lived here too, he mused. They called it the witchpower or something. Te Awaroa had known it when it touched him. The Force lived here too, as it lived within him. Lived within Te Awaroa. He lived within Te Awaroa. And he did not want to move out, move back, much though it nagged him, this past of his. He would not show Te Awaroa this little list of stray memories. He would roll the leaf up and hide it under the ferns of his bed –

"E tuhi ana koe?" 

Damn the man's stealthy step! Qui-Gon jumped at the warm voice at the back of his neck, glad to find himself restrained by strong arms clasping him to his master, his lover, his home. 

Well, so much for not seeing the words. 

Qui-Gon squirmed round in the big man's embrace, his smile still a little shaky.   
/ / What? / /

Te Awaroa raised his eyebrows, nodding at the _harakeke_ leaf bound to the post.   
/ / You are carving? / /

"E tuhi ana koe..." Qui-Gon said, slowly tasting the words. / / I am writing. / /

"E tuhi ana ahau." Te Awaroa said, the earnest tones of a teacher. Master, Qui-Gon thought, and the echo of the thought caught on Te Awaroa's mental voice as it supplied, / / I am - writing. / /

Blushing, Qui-Gon freed himself from his owner's embrace, making to take the leaf down from where it was strapped to the post, never meeting his lover's eyes. He shook his head slowly. / / Forgive me, but you are most definitely not writing... master. It is... it is nothing. / /

/ / It is something, Kuai. / / Te Awaroa's hand grasped Qui-Gon's, stopping it from reaching for the rope, then reverently trailed blunt fingertips over the faint letters. / / What is this something? It is like nothing I have seen. / /

/ / Words. / / Qui-Gon stared into Te Awaroa's earnestly interested face, sensing that he would not be satisfied with a short answer. / / They are things I remember. From... before. / / 

/ / From your home? / /

Qui-Gon shook his head. / / I don't have enough of it to call it home. / /

/ / Home, Kuai mine, is here. / / He grasped the house-post with one hand and the boy's waist with the other, covering the healing wound with one broad warm palm. 

/ / You have everything here. / /

/ / I have you here, and that is more than I have of... there. Yes. / / Qui-Gon leaned against his owner's solid form, contemplating the thin list of short words on the _harakeke_ leaf. 

/ / Words? / / Te Awaroa probed. / / What do they say? / /

Qui-Gon sighed. It was no use keeping secrets from a man who could read his mind, and read it well. What were a few words to keep him?

"Master," he read. 

/ / That one I know, / / Te Awaroa echoed amusedly. / / You call me by it. / /

/ / It seems I have always called someone by it. Though Master is very distant. Distant and erudite. My teacher, maybe... I don't know. He called me 'Padawan', / / Qui-Gon pointed to the second word, / / and all I know is that that meant me. / /

"Clothes, and wounds," he read out, / / the thing I was wearing when you first saw me. There was more of that somewhere. And I have hurt, sometimes, though I can't recall blood. / /

/ / You're not scarred, love. What did they do to you back there? / /

Qui-Gon shrugged, eyebrows drawn together. / / I don't know. I wasn't afraid of it, it seems. I was part of it./ / 

"Llipe," he said, / / I don't know what that means. Someone. All I see when I think of that word is a girl... / /

He felt Te Awaroa's arms tightening around him. / / One of your girls... so, I have no idea what or who Llipe was./ /

The arms relaxed slightly, and Qui-Gon squirmed a little, as if to appease a potential jealousy in the big man. 

/ / That is all you recall? / /

/ / There's two more words... Force, you know about the Force... these things we can both do... / /, he looked around in irritation at Te Awaroa's amused chuckle. / / Not _these_ things, matua. You know. The magic thing./ /

"Ae." / / I know, Kuai, I know. And the last word? / /

"Planet," Qui-Gon read out, hesitating for a moment, casting around for an explanation of the word.

Te Awaroa picked up on the faltering in his lover's mind. / / Where you are from? / /

/ / Sort of, / / Qui-Gon agreed. 

/ / Where is it? Across the sea? Is it an island? A land as vast as Aotearoa...? / /

A finger on his lip cut his agitated train of thought short. / / I'm not sure, matua. All I see in my mind is... well, this sounds silly but... there's many of them, and they're like islands, but... they're across the sky. / /

Te Awaroa's eyebrows made a creditable effort at joining the lines of his forehead tattoo. / / Islands across the sky?/ /

/ / I know. Insane. But I can't think where else I would have that idea from, if it wasn't... well, within me... / /

/ / Oh Kuai mine, never think that I'd call you insane. Where else would those islands be if they have people like you in them, with bone-white skin, eyes like shards of sky, and minds bigger and stranger than any of the lands I have seen? Islands in the sky is where you are from, and that is what you should be. / / 

A hand carded through Qui-Gon's straggly hair, turning his face so that his ear was at Te Awaroa's mouth, the tiny hairs of the chief's new beard prickling at the tender shell.

/ / And that is what you are. See, I always said your name was too short for one as tall as you. For one as vast as you. Welcome home, Kuai-Islands-in-the-Sky. / /

"Kuai Nga-motu-ki-te-rangi," whispered the chief's low voice in his ear, and Qui-Gon shuddered in amazement and delight.

/ / I shall let them know this is your name, love. At the next speech-time, you will be named. And I shall let them know you are not to be treated as a slave by anyone from now on. Except... maybe by me. / /

Confused, grateful, homeless and home, fighting tears and laughter, Qui-Gon Nga-motu-ki-te-rangi let himself be shoved up against the post, _harakeke_ and memories temporarily forgotten under the onslaught of his master's wondrous mouth.


	19. (In which everyone eats)

/ / I think you could do with a little more practice here, pet. / / 

Te Awaroa's mental voice was clearly amused, and Qui-Gon's eyes automatically darted up to the broad face to soak up the rare and fiercely warm smile. It was only the insistent downward gaze of those sharp grey-blue eyes and the exaggerated sigh that drew his own attention down towards the big man's hands.

/ / Oh. / /

The little basket he had so painstakingly woven from split _harakeke_ leaves had come unravelled, and its component parts were flopping sadly and soggily over Te Awaroa's massive palm, weighed down by the food they had been meant to hold. Damn. And he had been sure he had mastered the technically simple art of crockery production that the women of the tribe would perform without even looking at what their hands were doing. 

Apparently there was some trick to it, he surmised, staring at the soft pale puddle of pulped fern root, liberally sprinkled with bits of dried fish, and now liberally dripping all over his master's hand. Deliciously dripping over his master's hand.

Great minds think alike, he thought distantly as he reverently bent to the task of licking Te Awaroa's sticky fingers clean, relishing the texture of the simple meal combined so enticingly with the roughness and flavour of his wild lover's skin. Salty, hard. Thick strong fingers that had never been delicate about claiming him, grabbing, holding, spreading, thrusting inside and rubbing hard until he begged. And however much he kept trying to keep himself from begging, it just would not do. Te Awaroa wasn't having any of it. And in his heart of hearts, neither was Qui-Gon. 

Diligently, lasciviously, he licked every single one of his master's fingers clean before picking up what could be salvaged of the meal and hand-feeding his greedy master. 

/ / Better? / /

/ / Much. Remind me to keep from myself savaging the extra meat. / / He bit playfully into Qui-Gon's finger, rewarded by the most adorable little gasp and mock frown.

/ / I thought you had seen quite enough of what I look like under my skin, / / Qui-Gon teased, pointing at the ends of the scars visible above his kilt, now little more than thin raised black lines edged with a faint halo of warm red. 

Te Awaroa's expression sobered instantly, and a still-sticky fingertip slowly, thoughtfully, traced the erratic lines dashed across the young man's pale hip. 

/ / It's all right, matua. Well, this bit is, anyway. / /

/ / And I will make sure nobody touches you again. You are mine, Kuai, and everyone will know that. Everyone. / /

Trailing a moist fingertip over his owner's bristly new beard, Qui-Gon nodded.   
/ / Speaking of him, where is he? Haven't seen him for a while... / / 

/ / How observant, my one... always keeping an eye on our enemies. He left the day before yesterday, and to be honest, I'm glad to have him out of my hair for a while. It's to the south they're going, along the Great Water, to pay a friendly visit to some of the Ngai Waikato. Distant kin, back from the old days. Marriage is what they have in mind, of course... and I suppose it is about time for that. / /

/ / Marriage? / /

/ / Rangirua went with him. He is nearing the age, and I am sure once they've made it near any of the Ngai Waikato's places his face will be back to the rugged beauty he's supposed to have inherited from me. / /

/ / Ah, I've managed to convince you, now have I? / / The grin on Qui-Gon's features was silent but sang loudly in the Force. 

/ / Kuai Nga-motu-ki-te-rangi. Even I, Te Awaroa of the Ngati Wainui, shudder to think of what it must be like on the invisible islands you've come from. / / He took a deep ostentatious breath. / / Hundreds of your kind? It must be quite unbearable. / /

/ / I managed fine, thank you, matua. And they weren't invisible to me... it's just the light of the stars that's blotting them out from here. / /

/ / Behind the stars, your islands, hm? Inside the body of the Father Ranginui? Behind the eyes of the Great Ones? / /

/ / Is that what the stars are – eyes? Not... luminous bits of rock and fire? / / Is that what they are in my old world, he thought to himself, and did I ever actually bother to find out?

Te Awaroa shook his head, gravely. / / The stars come from here, from old Hawaiki, from Aotearoa, from the islands inhabited by men. Each star is the left eye of a great man dead and returned to Hawaiki. They guard us, you see? And they guard you, on your islands behind the stars. Though I'm going to get very cross with them when I get to Hawaiki for not telling me about them. And their gorgeous insufferable people. / /

/ / You seem to have an easier time believing in these islands than I have, love. It's so... distant, so foggy to me. / /

/ / Kuai. You. You are clearly not of this land, nor of the islands that stretch to the end of the world. But there are more things in heaven and earth than just... normal people. / /

"... tangata maori. " The words echoed in Qui-Gon's head as he registered Te Awaroa's deep earthy voice. A split second before he registered Te Awaroa's insistent hands fisting in his hair and pulling him in for a hurried kiss, then pushing his head down towards thick and rising flesh.

/ / I know that you are real, with my head and my heart and my whole body, / / the big man's inner voice began to pant slightly, / / why should I want you to be normal? When you are mine... / /

"Mmmph," Qui-Gon agreed, enthusiastically, feeling very much at home for the time being, just where he was, between the strands of Te Awaroa's kilt.

*** 

They had been received with all due pomp and circumstance, with a song-and-speech as befitted the young _rangatira_ and his minder of no less chiefly descent. Ketoa was well-known among the tribes of the land, and often travelled extensively in pursuit of his art, and Rangirua was received with no less a hearty welcome, considering he was kin.

It had dawned on Rangirua fairly early on that it was not the flat lands of the Ngai Waikato they were headed for. Not with such meagre provisions, and without a bearer slave to accompany them. Not without gifts to exchange. And not going up the hills instead of down towards the Great Water and along its edge. 

He was not stupid. He had asked. And Ketoa had replied that yes, they were going to visit with the Ngati Mura, and that he knew of wondrous beauties there who were only too keen to see the young prince of the Ngati Wainui, and meet him. And possibly rescue him from the attentions of little Witireka for good, and wasn't that a good thing...

Rangirua had cut him short. They were his disappeared mother's people, were they not? What good was there in going to visit them? He rudely squashed the streak of angry dread coursing through him at the though of meeting his mother's family. He did not want anything to do with them. Just like his father didn't. He spat on the ground. Great. There was no winning, was there?

You shall see, Ketoa had said, smiling serenely. And you shall like what you see. 

No gifts, Rangirua mused as he sat outside the _wharenui_ , the old meeting-house with its carved beams and rafters darkened by red ochre and old age. What magic has Ketoa wrought to win the favour of the people that should well have been bearing a grudge against us since... well, since the woman that was my mother ran away? What has he brought to placate them and to win this stately welcome...

He found himself distracted in a most welcome way as a plump, black-lipped beauty came towards him, depositing a large gourd on the freshly-swept ground. She produced some delicate food-baskets from under her arm and proceeded to fish from the large gourd the choicest delicacy the land had to offer: glistening succulent wood-pigeons, cooked and preserved in their own fat. The feast of kings, and the scent alone was enough to make the boy's mouth water, even without the beguiling smile the beady-eyed girl bestowed on him. 

The basket was tightly, firmly woven. The girl's hand was smooth and delicate. He felt... greedy. Rushed. Warm. Very warm. 

Ketoa had to nudge him repeatedly to get him to pay attention to their hostess, who had just arrived in a flurry of feathered cloak, sitting down gracefully on the mat prepared for her. 

For all that she took up space for two, she radiated dignity and barely concealed power from the sharp earth-brown eyes to the tips of her well-groomed long hair, streaming over her shoulders and totally failing to conceal an ample bosom that was bearing up impressively despite the fact that the lady was probably in her forties. Fine streaks of grey were beginning to show above her forehead, still almost drowned by the shining oiled black of her hair, rivalling the thick black of the tattoo on her ample chin. Curled, pointy shapes, flickering up towards the full blackened lips, split in a jovial smile. The flame of the Ngati Mura.

Her voice, when she spoke, was rough and yet gentle. Flowing, with a certain tinge to it that Rangirua, in his current state, could only describe as sticky.

"Welcome, Rangirua of the Ngati Wainui. It has been... more than fifteen years, I believe."


	20. (In which a tribal coup d'etat is planned)

"Higher. Fuck it, Rob, push! I know you're taller than that, and you sleeping with your feet in my face for the last four months – "

"Shut up, Jenkins. If sir would deign to stretch his own bloody long arms for a bit, we'd get at them things in no time at all. And you're bloody heavy," the man called Rob informed the lad standing precariously on his shoulders, reaching for the thick nest of small round greenish fruits just beyond his fingertips. "And hurry up, or they'll be ripe. Or something."

"Relax, Rob. They're fine as they are – they eat them, you know?"

"Oh, _they_ eat them? Your precious savages know what's good for _us_ , right? Then I'm just wondering why I haven't followed their grand example and had _you_ for supper, mate. They do that too, don't they? Cannibals, sandflies, bloody incessant rain. Hellhole of the South Pacific, I tell ya. Can't think why cap'n sent us ashore here, an' without the muskets, honest to God!"

"There's fruit," the boyish voice from above said, just before a small-scale hailstorm of   
them hit Rob's broad shoulders, "there's fresh water, and there's potential good Christian souls in this wilderness." Grinning at the roll of eyes underneath him, Jenkins added that vital half-sentence he knew Rob needed in order to be kept from hitting him as soon as they were eye-level again.

"... half of them women, I'm informed."

*** 

Rangirua was hungry. The shock had left him quite unable to eat anything much during the actual feast, and now that they had retired inside the house it would have been extremely rude to ask for food. And yet his thoughts kept straying to the delicious birds, and the no less delicious girl that had served them. Straying away from what was at hand. He found himself watching Ketoa, familiar anchor-stone in the whirlwind that this evening had become. Watching the slender hands as they twirled the knife he was always carrying, with its finely carved wooden handle and its hellishly sharp grey obsidian blade. A weapon fit for one who was not allowed to bear the _taiaha_ , the spear-club of the warrior. A weapon fit for one whose daily work was drawing blood.

He found himself watching Ketoa, so that he didn't have to watch Kiri Kehe.

That was her name. Kiri Kehe-a-rakau-maroke. He had not even known her full name. 

Had not known his own mother's full name. 

The more surprising, to him, was the earnest joy with which she had welcomed him, touching him firmly, not fussing like the old aunties at home would. She had traced the lines of his fresh tattoo, and nodded admiringly. She had looked him in the eye, and he had felt he could no longer find all the apprehension and anger he had held for so long. 

Of course he wasn't expecting her to fall into his arms and love him unconditionally. He was a grown man, after all, and no longer in need of hugs. Quite apart from the fact that Kiri Kehe might very well have crushed him if she had tried. But there was... respect for him in her eyes, as if he were something to look up to. As if he were indeed a young noble, a _rangatira_ , a chief-in-the-making. As if he was valuable. It was so believable, all of a sudden.

And she was friendly with Ketoa, which helped. He had learned that she had remarried, was the second wife of a high elder, and that she had held regular contact with Ketoa through her walkabout friend, a short-haired old hag named Whane, who was a familiar sight at the village and was just as much one of them as one of the Ngati Mura, the tribe that was not spoken of openly. 

Through all the diplomatic silence, the family contact had been kept. Without involving the actual family. But Kiri Kehe was well-inclined towards him, and that was what mattered now. His mother respected him, without asking. She knew. 

He felt warm, thickly wrapped in something untouchable. It might well be that the too-warm cloak that was slowly slipping off his shoulders in the stuffy warmth of the house, had been a concealed present from her. Ketoa had brought it from one of his travels once.

And they were still talking, like old friends, his mother and Ketoa. The knife danced from hand to hand, piercing the air to make a point, while Kiri Kehe sat and listened, the occasional flicker in her sharp dark eyes under the carefully plucked brows.

At last, a plump but authoritative hand fell on Ketoa's wrist, and the lady spoke up.

"It is very true what you say about the wrong that has been done to me, friend Ketoa. Heaven knows, some days my Ruhu speaks of little else. These are usually the days I send him to tend to his other wife, as you can well imagine... lest he forget the numerous offspring he has planted in her field." 

The slight sneer of disgust on her face was gone as quickly as it had appeared, and her noble features once again spoke of nothing but high esteem for her concerned husband. "It is what he speaks of in the recitation of our genealogies, every single year since it happened. 'Kiri Kehe-a-rakau-maroke, daughter of Te Hau Kura, nobly married to Te Awaroa of the Ngati Wainui, ignobly wronged and driven to seek her welcome home again, daughter of Te Hau Kura, daughter of the Ngati Mura'," she sing-songed. "Hell, everyone here knows what a bastard he's been. And far better than I ever knew, I suspect. The recitations have done their bit towards becoming reality, and who am I to contest them? We are within our rights to exact revenge on your people, and we both know that one of these days we will do just that. Not in _his_ lifetime, mind..." She smiled disarmingly, visibly projecting peace and understanding.

"And why not? Have the Ngati Mura grown to ashes so much that they can bear the weight of retribution not exacted? Have they made themselves cope with the ignominy of having one of their foremost ladies so ill-treated at the hands of an upstart warrior with little to his name but his sky-blue eyes and his big paws?" Ketoa smiled back, guessing at the answer already.

"They are weighed down heavily with the wrong done to me, and there is none here that would not gladly throw it off their shoulders and send a war party of our finest men beyond the hills to avenge it." She glared fiercely into Ketoa's eyes. When he merely smirked, she fixed Rangirua with her deep brown glittering gaze.

"But?" Ketoa prompted, inappropriate amusement tingeing his voice.

"Ketoa, you know perfectly well what's keeping Te Awaroa safe. You lie with him, for the Gods' sake – you know what a mighty man he is."

"I do indeed," Ketoa nodded with mock gravity, rubbing at an imaginary bruise on his upper arm, "an experience we undoubtedly share, Kiri Kehe. But surely you could muster a _taua_ , a party of good men that would stand a chance at overpowering him? He is, as you can probably imagine, not getting any younger."

"If it were only that," Kiri Kehe sighed, "I would have incited them long ago. Wouldn't even have needed Ruhu's insistent support. But you know as well as I do that this lover of yours is more than merely an unusually brawny warrior. His reputation is enough for three hundred men, and that is not counting the witchpower he has..."

"Ah, yes. The _mana_ of a great chief tends to be boundless..." Ketoa mused. "So there is no way the armed men of the Ngati Mura can be incited to exact their just revenge on the man who has wronged you so badly, and who in truth is little more than a rambunctious puppy in my bed, all growling strength and nowhere to put it?"

Kiri Kehe shook her head, her lips a thin black line.

"A sad state of affairs indeed." Ketoa nodded to himself, slowly twirling the sharp obsidian blade between his fingers.

"Surely you have not come to tell me that, Ketoa. What is the purpose of this meeting? Why are you not out among the young with Rangirua here who is doubtless bored out of his pretty head? What have you brought this time, Ketoa?"

Ketoa cast an uneasy glance at Rangirua, mooching in the corner. "Rangirua. You know, she is right, boy. Why aren't you out among the young? Get out there and dance – I bet you anything you won't be stuck for offers."

Nodding, Rangirua levered himself to his feet. His head was too full as it was, and listening to them two talk in the stuffy warmth of the house would likely give him a monster headache. Besides, he _was_ interested in the girl... Hineraa, was that her name? Daylight girl. Shouldn't be too hard to find in the dark.

Satisfied, Ketoa leaned in towards Kiri Kehe.

"I have brought you a way, Kiri. A way to take your revenge on the man."

"You're joking. Where would that leave you, without him? You're his second wife, as far as I know!"

"Ah, ah, Kiri," a slender hand patted the lady's knee gently, "that is but what you know. Old news, I'm afraid. I have been... supplanted." The bitterness in his voice drew Kiri Kehe's attention. Her eyebrows danced, and her lips bloomed into a surprised 'o'.

"Yes. Supplanted. Replaced, even, by a plainface little slave-boy who grovels before him and submits to his every whim. You can imagine what that makes me, Kiri."

"Rather annoyed, I assume?" The smirk in her voice was tentative but promising.

"I'm losing him, Kiri, and damn that angers me."

"Though why you'd want to keep someone like him still eludes me, even after all these years..."

"Because I can, Kiri. Because I can. Keep him, like a pet. The rush of having that big growling beast be _mine_ , and everyone looking up at me. Me who's tamed him. Me, the _born_ rangatira, back in place holding secret sway over him. Where I belong. Where the gods say it's right for me to be." A long pause. "And the sex isn't bad either."

"I reserve the right to disagree on that last count," Kiri Kehe snapped haughtily. "So why don't you get rid of that slave cur and be done with it? I don't see why you need me to help you with that, poor boy."

"That is precisely where the problem lies. Those oh-so-mysterious witchpowers, see? They think he's got them too now, the thin plainface boy. They're scared of him, of him taking over? And of course Te Awaroa is absolutely besotted with the little git, never lets him out of his sight, always parading around with one hand on him somewhere. The picture of loveliness." He spat on the ground.

"What you're saying is..."

"Hell, yes. Your people wouldn't encounter resistance. The Wainui would be glad to be rid of the little plainface. And it's not like you need a fully-fledged war for all that."

"Oh?"

"He's grown slovenly, Kiri. Lying abed late in he mornings, groping his pet. One, maybe two dozen of your best, stealthy men. At dawn. No formalities. Surround the house, dispose of the slave, buffet Te Awaroa around a bit, maybe take him captive for a while. Nothing too drastic..."

"There would be no resistance?"

"None that could not be quelled by a small war party of your men, Kiri. Hell, you know how we've been. Te Matangi and his beloved house-building _wananga_... and Te Awaroa preferring to expend his energy in bed rather than in the field... we haven't trained our boys to be warriors for years. There just wasn't anyone who'd dare fight us, so there was no fighting. And trust me, Kiri, nobody would go fight the murderers of that abominable bone-white slave!"

"White, you say?"

"Yes – a freak, a stranger from some savage place. He doesn't even speak our language, can you believe that? Nobody would miss him. Look at it that way: we would all win. You would get your revenge, Ruhu would get the prestigious Te Awaroa's _mana_ , and I would get him under my toes again."

"Minus the _mana_ ," Kiri Kehe interjected, earnestly.

"Oh, yeah. That. But, you know... I don't need him to be chief any longer. There is another... quite capable, let me assure you. As you well know. He's got your blood in his veins..."

The lady's face brightened up considerably. "You mean..."

"Oh yes. Rangirua is quite the chieftain material. I have seen to that. Te Matangi and his lot are very much in favour of him taking over from Te Awaroa one day. And who says that day can't be... rather sooner than everyone involved suspected?"

"My son, the new chief."

"And the old chief: my pet."

Two pairs of brown eyes glittered at each other in the darkness of Kiri Kehe's house. 

"Ketoa... if I didn't hate them with such a passion, I would be very tempted to have your babies."

"Don't worry," Ketoa replied with an aristocratic smirk. "I'm not inclined to make babies. Other people's children are infinitely more rewarding. Oh, and keep him amused for the next couple of days, all right? I don't want him to know too much. Might come as a nasty shock to be the new chief, and with his face only half-finished."

"No, you're right. He might as well have some fun with our girls before life gets all serious for him."

"Oh, it won't be too heavy a burden, dear. I'll see to that."

"And I will see to Ruhu and the best of our men sitting at your feet tomorrow at dawn, Ketoa."

"My directions will be flawless. Until then, sleep well."

"And you." 

The kiss on Kiri Kehe's cheek was as close as he had ever come to genuine affection.


	21. (In which the one who lies with the chief lies to the chief)

A perfect fit, as if the two had been made for each other. Well, they had, for all they did come from different realms of this world. The hard heavy greenstone, chipped and dulled with age and use, concealing the fact that it was quite sharp at the front edge, and the fresh _manuka_ branch, carefully trimmed into a smooth handle, straight, pale, perfect in his hand. He hefted them both in his hands, separate for the last time, then proceeded to join them into one, adze and haft. 

Slowly, as the long twine of braided flax fibres wound around the join, slipping easily into the grooves he had cut into the wood, he watched them become one. So like us, he thought. The old hard stone, heavy and chipped, and yes, it's got bits of grey in it, and yet revered. And the young smooth wood, light and yet so much stronger than it seemed. Although the image had one major flaw.

 _Manuka_ grew everywhere. Kuai was one of a kind.

He did not look up from his work as the familiar shadow fell on his hands. He did not have to look up to see who it was. He sensed it wasn't Kuai, and he knew that only one other would dare stand so close to him without speaking to him.

"You are back early."

"The path was smooth, and the people were genteel."

"Then why did you leave again so quickly? Nothing to be had in terms of girls?"

"Oh, quite on the contrary. I thought it best, though, to let him dance a few dances of his own, so to speak. Without the watchful parental eye. He's taken quite a shine to one of them already... and we wouldn't want to rush decisions, would we?" He leaned in to rub his cheek against Te Awaroa's shoulder, who remained as stoic and hard as the greenstone.

"That so?" he asked, sounding more than a little pleased despite Ketoa's unwanted attentions.

"Oh yes. Leave it to the young ones to make peace between the tribes."

"Peace?" Te Awaroa dropped the adze in his lap, frowning up at his husband. "The Ngai Waikato are talking of peace? The cheek – what reason have they ever had to be at odds with us? None, since we parted from them in good spirits, to set up here in the north –"

"Calm, love, calm. You may have misunderstood. It is not the Ngai Waikato I am speaking of."

"That is what you told me. Then who-" Te Awaroa's rage ground to a halt at the sight of Ketoa's triumphant smile. "No."

"Yes. The likely candidate is the very sweet Hineraa, daughter of the mighty, and mighty conciliatory, Te Ruhu of the Ngati Mura. They are hoping, by this marriage, to put to rest once and for all the lingering grudge they have borne us since... you know when."

"Any word of her?"

Ketoa shook his head, compassionately. "Nothing. That said, I did not specifically ask, and they seemed happy enough to put the whole story to bed. Quite literally, actually," he added with a grin, picturing young Rangirua earning his first fumbling sexual experience in the bed of the voluptuous Hineraa. Or any of her friends.

"Is it honest you are being with me, Ketoa? The Ngati Mura – Te Ruhu is willing to make his peace with us? Offering, just like that? What of Te Hau Kura? Surely he would not agree to such a thing?"

"Te Hau Kura, my dear, has been dead for nearly a decade, and his memory speaks far less loudly than the voices of the young and alive. With him gone, and her Gods know where but certainly nowhere important, it is the best we can do to ally ourselves to them. Think about it – walking the hills will be a lot less awkward. And with you and Te Ruhu joined by your children's marriage, nobody will dare even think about attacking us. Rangirua will inherit the peace Te Matangi and you have sown, and the gods will once again lay their favour upon the Ngati Wainui."

Once the slave is disposed of, he added silently to himself.

"That is good news indeed." Te Awaroa rose to his full height, hefting the completed adze in his right hand, and Ketoa found himself greedy for the time after, for when he would have that great beast of a man in his bed again. In his bed, and at his bidding.

"Let us have a feast in the _marae_ when the boy returns, to celebrate the good news," Te Awaroa rumbled, interrupting Ketoa's altogether too pleasant train of thought. 

"Ah... that might be some time still, I believe. I asked him not to rush things... and the Ngati Mura are looking after him well. In fact, Te Ruhu sends this as a token of his goodwill." With a flourish, he produced a whalebone fishhook from the folds of his cloak, delicate and fiendishly sharp, hafted to a wooden end-piece with a wide inlay of _paua_ shell green as the forest and blue as the sky. Reddish-brown feathers adorned the top. A beautiful piece of craftsmanship, and likely passed from generation to generation, if the yellowish colour of the bone was anything to go by. Yes, this was the work of his former wife's people, he believed that much. Rangirua was well. All was well.

Silently, he took the hook from Ketoa's outstretched hand, uneasy at the gratitude he felt towards the man. Clearing his throat, he raised his voice so that the few people within earshot would hear and pass on the happy news.

"Let there be feasting tonight, then, from my pots and storehouse, to celebrate the peaceful marriage of my son. Let the women cook and the men sing, for the good that has happened to the Ngati Wainui."

"That is my husband. Be joyful tonight, love. I will go tell Te Matangi and his numerous family, so that they may turn out in force... oh, and can I borrow your slave for an hour or so?" He trailed a fingertip over the traveller's stubble on his cheek, batting his eyelashes seductively.

"No." The answer was gruff. "He is mine. And he is not anybody's slave any more. As for Te Matangi, let me go tell him as it is to be my feast. As for your cheeks, get Whitireka's sister to do them for you. I'm sure she would be delighted."

Tucking the adze into his belt, Te Awaroa strode off, leaving his husband nonplussed and fuming. 

_His_ feast. His last feast. His last night as chief of the Ngati Wainui, if he had anything to do with it. 

And he had.


	22. (In which everyone eats again)

/ / You're not going out like that, master. / /

Te Awaroa turned around, the tattooed frown on his face softening at his young lover's beautiful earnest face. Large bony hands so like his own were busy in his hair, the scent of Kuai's freshly-scrubbed skin filling his nostrils, and he wondered dimly when he had ceased to be Kuai's master and become his slave, devoted to him with every fibre of his being. Fibres that were being rearranged by busy hands, watched over by these impossibly sky-blue eyes.

He was at his finest – wearing the shorter and less worn of his two kilts, tied about with a brand new belt, a present from one of Te Matangi's elder daughters, made from fresh shiny green _harakeke_ strips interwoven with dried beige ones into a pattern that was as beautiful as it was short-lived. It would offset the whalebone _patu_ nicely, which was lying on the side, waiting to be tucked into the belt. He did not normally wear weaponry, and hadn't done so for what seemed like ages, but he knew what was proper, and for the chief to appear at a feast in anything less than all his glory would be unthinkable. 

Kuai had fluffed up his beloved old kiwi-feather cloak, adorning the frayed hem with a thick fringe of the stringy yet soft plumage of the moa the hunters had caught the other day. The other day. It seemed like ages ago too.

He had unpacked the little carved box he had kept tied to the rafters of his house for what seemed even more like ages, and taken out the greenstone pendant he never bothered to wear. Kuai had frowned, then grinned at the twisted human figure it represented, all curled limbs, a beak with teeth for a mouth, and huge round eyes inlaid with shell. It did not match the paler green of the oblong pendant hanging from his pierced ear, but it did not have to. He was wearing more shades of green than an average forest anyway, what with the kakapo feathers at the top of his cloak, and the fresh _harakeke_ braided into his belt, and the gods only knew what Kuai was doing with his hair.

It felt good anyway, those warm hands scrabbling around in his messy mane, smelling of shark oil scented with herbs. He was wearing it in his customary style, the top half tied back to keep it out of his face, the rest streaming heavily over his shoulders and back, and as far as he could tell, Kuai had not changed that. When he felt those hands leaving his head, and caught a glimpse of his still gloriously naked boy bending down to rummage through the treasure-box, Te Awaroa ran a furtive hand over the back of his head.

Soft. But not soft as in Te Awaroa's own unruly hair tamed by gentle hands and liberal application of shark oil. Soft as in – fluffy. The thong that held his hair neatly tied in the customary place was... furry? Dogskin. Soft, precious, long-haired dogskin tied tightly, the ends tucked in neatly. He fumbled with the bit where it merged with his own hair, and came away with a long thin white hair. White dogskin. Wherever had he got that from. A soft white patch at the back of his head, bright against the increasing grey in his own hair. Was there no end to the boy's imagination and reverence? And would he put some clothes on and stop tempting the long-suffering man with the enticing sight of his pink bottom?

He would not. Instead, he triumphantly brandished the feather he had retrieved from the treasure-box, a long, sharply pointed sea bird's feather of the purest white, and silently slid it into the tightly wound leather coil.

/ /White as a cloud. / / Kuai stepped back to admire his handiwork, tipping Te Awaroa's chin down a little to get a good view.

/ / White as... as you, aroha. / / 

"Aroha?"

/ / Love. / /

"Aroha."

And Kuai glowed. 

Te Awaroa grinned, a little helplessly, very aware of how un-chiefly the expression on his face was, finery or not. Very aware of how much he just wanted to eat that sexy slender flame of a boy whole and keep him inside himself forever, away from the envious glares of the others. 

Oh yes. But first, there would be the other kind of feasting.

*** 

"I'm still not sure it's a good idea, Rob." Jenkins poked around in the embers of the dying campfire, pretending to try and find another of the tuberous roots they had roasted in there, with moderate success. 

"You're scared? Hey, Jenkins, wait till I tell the lads about that one. They'll be pissing themselves with laughter, mate. Big Henry Jenkins acting like a little girl at the thought of a few scrawny savages!" Balfour, Peter Balfour. Of course. Bright red hair, pointy nose, sharp biting tongue. No senior to any of the other sailors, but he always got what he wanted. Somehow.

Jenkins sighed. "Look... it's not that I'm scared. I just… I just don't see why we're going inland to... well, to... what're we doing there?"

"Food," Rob interjected, between bites of the stuff. "Plants, beasts. The richness of this country is not all on this shore, Henry. There's... there's fowl, and fruit, and..."

"Bloody savages," Jenkins cut in, miserably, poking around in the embers to cover up his unmanly fear.

"Yeah," Balfour spat into the glow, making the embers hiss. "Girls. Like you."

Rob snorted, amused. "That's one way of seeing it. If we do meet them, who says we're going to run across a bunch of armed men? Could just as well be sweet girls welcomin' us. Bare-breasted, brown-skinned young maidens, eh?" He laid a soothing hand on Jenkins' shoulder, who flinched.

"Besides, there's exploration. How would you feel being one of the first Englishmen to have made contact with a new tribe? They might end up worshipping you," Rob continued, a winsome grin on his face, "you'd be important."

"They might end up killing me," Jenkins retorted, less forcefully now. "And me not even knowing what for."

"Food," Balfour snorted. "What say you, Miss Jenkins, if we all took a musket each off the boat, would that make you feel safer?"

"Excellent idea," Rob agreed, beaming at Jenkins' reluctant nod. "I was going to suggest that anyway. Makes the hunting easier too, if we're all armed, all three of us."

"And a gunshot speaks more clearly than any savage babbling war cries at ya," Balfour concluded, spitting into the fire one last time before it went out, leaving the three men in soft grey barely moonlit darkness. "Muskets it is, lads."

"At dawn tomorrow. When the forest wakes. Night, lads." Answered by a pair of affirmative grunts, Rob Greene snuggled down on top of his coat, dreaming of exploration and captaincy and fowl and handsome young savages.

*** 

There was a hole in the song. Not that the earnest young woman with the severely tied-back hair wasn't singing it properly. She was, as far as he could tell – long narrow melody lines carried out to the fire-lit sky on the back of her low metallic voice, sped along by her hands telling the story she was singing in gestures both graceful and forceful. She was one of Te Matangi's many daughters, and she commanded the rapt attention of everyone present, even Te Awaroa who sat cross-legged on the ground near the fire, framed by his husband and his slave, radiating regal beauty as he followed the age-old song.

The song that had a hole in it.

Not intentionally – Qui-Gon was sure there wasn't a second when the woman had not been singing it with all she was worth. But there had been a second when she just hadn't, well hadn't been _there_. He wouldn't have noticed if the bit where her song should have been had just been void, and would have attributed it to his wandering mind. And that mind had reasons enough to wander seeing as he still didn't understand the words she was singing, and more importantly, seeing as the man next to him was slowly driving him mad with his sheer presence.

But the bit where her song should have been had been filled with... noise. Dull noise, sounding more mechanical than anything should have a right to sound. Just a second, a fleeting moment punched out of his consciousness. He remembered having such moments before, once maybe or twice, but they had been shorter and less... well, less memorable. Hadn't they? Had they... been there at all?

Qui-Gon shook his head, eyes irresistibly drawn towards Te Awaroa's noble profile as he earnestly listened to the woman singing from across the fire. He physically felt the holes in his mind being filled up by his lover, his scent, his voice, the way his lips looked, glistening faintly with the scented shark oil he had rubbed onto them. The warm rough glow in the back of his mind, more soothing than the fire right in front of him. And hotter.

***   
There were no more holes in the rest of the evening. Te Awaroa's face lit up looking at him, full of promise. Te Matangi rose to his feet slowly, as if making a point of displaying his venerable old age lest anyone should have forgotten that it was he who was largely to blame for the Ngati Wainui's existence.

Heads nodded in quiet assent as he launched into a speech that seemed to feel familiar to most of the assembled, his warm cracked voice swooping at the words like a bird of prey, in elegant, economical movements that never failed to impress. His long cloak with the patterned border slipped off his shoulders as he gestured confidently with the short carved stick he held in his right hand, eyes fixed in the middle distance, looking at nobody, speaking to all.

/ / He is recounting the history of our people, / / Te Awaroa whispered in Qui-Gon's mind, having picked up on the blank expression on his lover's face. / / From the days of the Great Canoes to the days when a young man with lots of confidence and even more children decided to set up his own tribe and move north... and take with him all his friends and all those who liked the idea of living at the Great Water./ /

/ / Is that how you came to be called the Ngati Wainui? / /

/ / It is indeed. Though I don't know how long that name will hold, given the respect that man commands among us... sooner or later, we will be named after him, as our founding ancestor, I think. / /

/ / Named what? / /

/ / Ngati Matangi. / /

/ / Oh... / /

Te Awaroa grinned. / / He is more or less my adopted father. The keeper of craft lore, and the builder of houses. The mind of the entire tribe, where I am but the body. / /

/ / Oh. Yes. You're but the body. Have I managed to suck you so brainless, huh? / /

Te Awaroa's clearing of throat to hide an involuntary moan went unnoticed by Te Matangi, who was just getting into his speech now, picking up speed and gesturing into the gloom by his feet, where an indistinct round shape was lying on a bed of fresh leaves on top of a mat.

Qui-Gon strained to see what it was, closing one eye to shut out the glare of the fire. It looked like... a skull. A... head. With hair. And skin. And tattoos. And no eyes.

Alarmed, Qui-Gon tugged on Te Awaroa's hair, eerily like that of the dead head. 

/ / What, aroha? / /

/ / That... skull. What...? / /

/ / Te Tiru-no-maunga-wera. His _tuakana_. His elder brother, / / Te Awaroa added, seeing the horror on the young man's face turning into incomprehension. / / He keeps him well-revered. Matangi rescued him from enemy hands back when they were both young. Unfortunately, Te Tiru was already dead at the time. / /

/ / So he... preserved the head? / /

Te Awaroa nodded, a little puzzled at his young lover's apparent incomprehension. What was so odd about keeping mementoes of your loved ones? Especially if in doing so you could keep them from being desecrated by enemies?

/ / So that he may look upon his brother's face and keep him with his family, yes. / /

Qui-Gon swallowed, chancing another glance at the head on its leaf-strewn mat. It had a slightly disgusted expression on its face, but that, Qui-Gon surmised, was largely due to it not having eyes any more, the lids being squinted shut, and the mouth open in a sneer despite efforts to close it with a stitch across the middle of the black lips. The head was baring remarkably even and white teeth, and the thick hair lying coiled on the mat was a deep black. The man must have been young when he was cut down.

/ / Is that what your people do with their dead? / / Your people, Qui-Gon thought, why am I saying 'your people'? Why did they not feel like my people there for a moment? I'm at home here, am I not? Concentrating on Te Awaroa's answer, he felt the odd feeling fade to nothing. He was at home here, with Te Awaroa.

/ / Only the revered ones, and the slain enemy chiefs. We put them up on stakes and mock them long after they're dead. You should have seen Rangirua when he was a child – quite the fierce little warrior he was, screaming at the dead heads... all long buried now, along with the wars, of course. And we haven't had a head embalmed for a long time – Te Matangi, gods bless him, continues to grow older and wiser, and as for slaying in battle, that has become a near-forgotten practice... / /

He smiled at Qui-Gon, lips closed, consciously dispelling the image so visible in the boy's eyes: of his own, Te Awaroa's, head, cut off and preserved in oil and smoke, the tattooed lines of his face preserved for eternity. 

/ / May it stay so. May you live to be older than Te Matangi, mine... / /

Te Awaroa grinned. / / Do you know what you're letting yourself in for, aroha? / /

/ / Oh yes. You, with a mane of snow-white hair. Softer and thinner, gentler as your brutal strength fades away... / /

/ / You have a problem with my brutal strength? / / The teasing glitter in the darkened blue eyes made Qui-Gon's mouth water. 

/ / I didn't say that. / / Defensive, but squirming ever so slightly.

/ / I'll show you who's master, / / Te Awaroa's mental voice rumbled, and they both knew that the answer to that was no longer merely one name.

*** 

In the end, Te Awaroa showed everyone who was master, and who was no longer slave. When the women had sung again, and the turn was his to speak, he rose to his full impressive height, white feather shining above his head, and announced to all and sundry that peace would be made with the Ngati Mura, that his son was to be married to a noble girl of that tribe, and that Kuai Nga-motu-ki-te-rangi was to be treated as a common man of the tribe now, and no longer a slave.

At least that was what Qui-Gon knew he was going to say. He still couldn't make out much of what he was actually saying, except for the names. He had found himself watching Ketoa's face for the wince of righteous indignation at the honour bestowed on him, the plain-faced slave boy, and found nothing. Not even when Qui-Gon clearly heard his own name, longer now than ever before, ring out across the fire in Te Awaroa's authoritative voice. I sound like one of their ancestors and noble warriors, he thought. I sound like one of them. 

And Ketoa's face remained calm, pleased even. And he murmured assent and nodded along with everyone else as Te Awaroa stepped down and sat down between his old lover and his new one again. And he did not even try to capture Te Awaroa's attention, thoroughly captured for the rest of the evening by his delicious ex-slave.

The delicious ex-slave could not find it in himself to worry. He felt fulfilled – the holes in his mind being filled by Te Awaroa's earthy presence, the hole in his stomach being filled by the smoky meats and tender roots and sweet sticky berries of the feast, humbly accepted from the chief's thick fingers, with a glance that was anything but humble.

A sharp tug on his braid pulled him back to the real world.

/ / I'll teach you to keep calling me master. / /

Qui-Gon grinned. / / Yes, master. / /


	23. (In which strangers arrive, and breath departs)

His senses were wide awake, though his body was pleasantly heavy and drowsy. Yawning and rearranging himself gingerly on the mat-covered fern mattress so as not to disturb his slumbering lover, Te Awaroa rested his head on his shoulder and let his senses take their lead.

He smelled the light drizzle putting out the last of the night's embers, leaving a thin blanket of smoke over the _marae_ outside. And he smelled the warm fresh sweat of his lover who had thrown off most of the cloak he had used for a blanket and lay sprawled on the mat, rivalling its polished paleness and softness.

He saw the greyish light of an overcast morning filling the small rectangle of the door, saw the grey in his own hair as it hung into his eyes, dishevelled and still shiny with the oil Kuai had massaged into it. And he saw the exquisite long lines of Kuai in sleep, thin brown braid trailing down one shoulder, and the flower he had tucked into it last night wilted and brownish now, the colour of old blood, beautiful against the soft pale skin.

He heard the distant chattering voices of the women heading for the gardens and the boys and men heading for the woods to replenish the food supplies squandered in last night's feast, heard the pitter-patter of children's feet as they ran to keep up with everyone else. It seemed he was the only one still in bed. Well, him and Kuai. And he heard Kuai's deep soft breathing, loud in his ears.

He felt the chill of the autumn morning touching his face and shoulders and wondered why he had not felt the cold last night, not even long after he had moved away from the fire, not even long after the fire had died. And he felt the easy languid warmth radiating off Kuai's sleeping form, and he knew why he had not felt the cold.

And he tasted the warm sweaty spot at the nape of Kuai's neck, where the hair was beginning to grow out. Tasted slowly, gently, not wishing to wake the boy up yet. Not when he was such a feast asleep.

*** 

Carefully and with a look of disgust on his face, Henry Jenkins touched the growth that looked like a tangled beard of brown snakes. 

"See, it doesn't bite. Grab hold of it, thrust a foot in, give me one hand, and Bob's your uncle," Rob encouraged from above him. "Oh, and throw me your musket first. There's a good lad."

Embarrassed, Jenkins hauled himself up the steep bank, clinging to the aerial roots of the overhanging _pohutukawa_ tree. 

Coming down would be easier, and he wished he were doing just that already. Though of course he wouldn't let on.

*** 

Kuai's skin... he felt quite certain that if he was ever trapped in a hopeless situation with no food nor escape, he would quite happily suck on Kuai's skin until death took him, and die a happy man. Salty, soft and moist, and so very him... Te Awaroa licked his way from the nape of the boy's neck to the even softer spot behind one ear, breathing shallowly, watching for the first signs of Kuai's awakening.

The boy slept on, blissfully ignorant, a small smile twitching on his dreaming lips.

Bolder, Te Awaroa trailed his hand down the warm flank, coming to rest at the small of his back, and began to tease the top of Kuai's crack with two gentle blunt fingertips.

*** 

The tip of a _taiaha_ peered round the trunk of a large tree, followed by a pair of watchful brown eyes set in a fiercely tattooed face. Then a pair of bare feet, stealthy as the oppressive chilly morning air.

Then another pair of feet. And another. And another...

*** 

The fingertips got bolder, creeping towards that enticing narrow space between the firm buttocks. He had a comfortable resting place for his palm now, just on Kuai's tailbone. Slowly, he let his fingers slip along the sweaty, tender skin.

Was the boy breathing harder now? Or was he hearing things? Still, it would not do to have him wake up on anything less than a scream of pleasure. 

Moving imperceptibly slowly, Te Awaroa levered himself off the mattress, working up some spit.

*** 

"Did you hear that?"

"What, Jenkins?" The annoyed undertone in Balfour's voice was all too plain. "For Christ's sake, this is a jungle. It's full of 'did you hear that'. Which particular one did you have in mind? The cicadas? The birds? The groaning of old wood? My god, calm down, Jenkins, and do us all a favour. Besides, you've got a musket. And that makes the loudest 'did you hear that' of them all."

Biting his tongue, Jenkins trudged on, convincing himself he had not just heard the whisper of a human voice.

*** 

Te Wakaatua, son of the great Te Hau Kura and keeper of his considerable _mana_ , glared as only a deceased chief's son can glare. 

Silently, the offending warrior slipped to the front of the group, to the most dangerous position. 

Stealth was paramount, and he would not have his reputation tarnished with a less than successful raid.

*** 

Qui-Gon screamed as he found himself torn out of his rather pleasant and fuzzy dreams and impaled on something hard and scalding hot.

Oh, that felt... wonderful.

Gasping, unable to form words with Te Awaroa on top of him, driving the breath out of him and pounding his brain into a blissful mush, Qui-Gon struggled futilely, revelling in the man's iron hold on him, dizzy with his own glorious helplessness as Te Awaroa sank his teeth in Qui-Gon's shoulder, moaning his savage pleasure into his lover's willing flesh. 

It couldn't last. A few more earth-shattering thrusts, and Te Awaroa was coming, burning hot inside him, squeezing Qui-Gon's throbbing cock and balls relentlessly until he too gave in and screamed his completion into the mattress, shattered, filled, fulfilled, and utterly ready to go straight back to sleep.

*** 

He woke up to screaming again.

Not his own.

Startled, he raised his head, blinking.

And found himself looking directly into the point of a _taiaha_. Two _taiaha_. Opening his mouth to speak, he decided wisely to close it again as his eyes started taking in the scene.

/ / Master? / /

/ / Kuai... / /

The voice was weak, muddled. Instinctively, Qui-Gon turned his head to seek its owner, causing the two spear points to press more tightly into his throat. 

There. There was blood. On the floor. Seeping from a wound at Te Awaroa's temple, Te Awaroa who was lying on the floor, fighting a losing battle against them, against ten, twelve men holding him down, ten, twelve spears and clubs and feet and voices, it was all too bright, too bright.

They had torn some of the walls down barging into the house, ten, twelve of them, and the two threatening Qui-Gon himself. Three, he amended as he felt a rough length of rope being pulled tight around his wrists, lashed to his ankles in the most careless fashion, and he was unable to fight back if he didn't want to end up speared in the throat.

"Matua! Te Awaroa! Aroha... noho konei..."

He struggled for all the actual words he could remember, shouting to his lover until his breath was knocked out of him by a casual foot to the midriff. Aroha, he heard in return, weakly as Te Awaroa's voice was muffled by a hand over his mouth, yet another hand, too many hands, strange hands that had grabbed his love and were making sure he stayed put. They were binding him too, as best as they could given how many hands it took to keep the fiercely struggling body down. The back of Qui-Gon's head was buzzing, noise filling the place where Te Awaroa's mental voice was, as if the man was desperately trying to crank up the connection, to stay within his one's mind.

Qui-Gon screamed and lunged for the nearest foot, trying to bite it in terror and anger.

The foot connected solidly with his throat, and the scream died.

Then, what was left of the doorway darkened as another man came in. Not running, not terrified. Not even jerky with the rush of war.

He came sauntering in, slowly, with that casual strut of his that had so many girls mooning after him in vain. He smiled, nodded at the grotesque number of warriors in the remnants of Te Awaroa's house. The he sauntered over to the less prestigious of the two captives, and Qui-Gon's heart stopped.

Ketoa.

He kept smiling, saying not a word. Or maybe he was being drowned out by the buzz in Qui-Gon's head, there where Te Awaroa was, shaken badly by the blow but still very much there, wordless but close, warm, good.

Ketoa advanced, calmly, took one look at Qui-Gon's twisted bound body on the ground, and kicked him square in the face.

His own scream was a pathetic croak, drowned out by the sickening crunch of bone breaking as he tasted, smelled blood seeping from his nostrils, filling his head with the dreadful iron taste. 

Louder than his own scream was that of Te Awaroa, in the back of his head, close, very close, enraged, and he saw from the corner of one squinted-shut eye how he was struggling against his captors, nearly getting to his feet before being knocked down again, closer to Qui-Gon. 

Louder still were the triumphant shouts of the enemy warriors, taunting, roaring their cowardly victory to all beyond the ruins of the house, to all who would hear.

Louder still was the explosion that shattered the air from a short distance away and caused a body to slump to the ground wailing, a mere step away from where Qui-Gon lay on the ground curled up away from Ketoa's vicious kicks. The crack split the air in two, and stunned all the voices into silence, silence only filled with the moaning of the wounded men, Te Awaroa, Qui-Gon and the fallen warrior. Then, a voice rang out from across the _marae_ , strained and hoarse, out of breath from running.

"They've got one of us, they've got an Englishman!!"

Qui-Gon did not trust his senses, muddled senses overfull with the taste of blood and the buzzing in his head. Had he heard voices? Had he _understood_ words? Were there really three men, pale-skinned people like him, running towards the house waving... blasters? What... what were they? All he could see was the warriors freezing in terror, then shouting at each other as one man, a jumble of terrified syllables and discarded weapons, and all too scared to even flee, they stood rooted to the spot as the strange white men advanced, running, panting... Force, find the Force...

He saw the twisted mask of impotent rage that had been Ketoa's face, then saw the obsidian knife slashing at his throat a split second too late, then he saw nothing any more.

Saw nothing, but continued to breathe. Someone had thrown himself between him and the knife. There was a solid wall of body on top of him, smeared with the blood from his nose.

There was more blood. He felt it trickling down the fallen man's chest, seeping onto his skin, mingled with the scent that was too familiar, too real, and too silent. The buzzing in his head was fading, and Qui-Gon realised, horrified, that he was still conscious. 

Conscious and drenched in Te Awaroa's blood.

Screaming, he kicked and struggled against his bonds, biting into his wounded lover's flesh in an attempt to keep him here, keep him awake and alive, barely noticing the knife, in white hands, slicing through his bonds, batting away the concerned hand as he wrapped his arms around the fading body, the mental voice barely an echo in his head.

/ / Master... master... aroha... aroha... / / His own voice incapable of anything more than choked sobs and cries, wordless cries, anything to reach into that head that was slowly, heavily falling into his lap, blood no longer trickling from the caved-in temple. Blood washing warmly, steadily from the deep long gash across the man's throat.

He pressed his hand to the gaping wound, and found it drenched in red a second later. He scrabbled for the Force, for anything he could move, could give, could do, and found nothing that was not too little, too late, and drenched in red too.

He thought he heard, believed, with every last fading ounce of strength he had, the echo of his words in the numb back of his head.

/ / ... aroha... / /

Louder than all the commotion around him. Louder than all the silence that descended in the back of his mind as the sky-blue eyes in the marked beloved face faded to sightlessness. Long before the blood had stopped flooding him with all the life force this man had held for so long. All the life that had drained from him in just one moment of cold cruel mindless emptiness.

Gasping for breath through his broken nose, his choked-up throat, Qui-Gon sank down on the body of the man who had been his home. 

The blood on his forehead was warm. Warm home. 

Something inside him broke, and he gratefully slipped into cold merciful unconsciousness.


	24. (In which Qui-Gon is not all there)

HMS Artemis, on-board log Qui-Gon Jinn:

_My nose has opened up again. A sure sign that I'm healing, if only in body – the first thing to penetrate the swollen and torn tissues was the stench from a keg of supposedly fresh whale meat. Besides that, not much gets into my head. Straightening my nose is beyond hope it seems. Some reminder, that..._

***

Qui-Gon clutched the railing, trying hard not to think. Not to think on whether this was real, not to think on the hole that had been in the middle of the sea, invisible, a piece of not-sea in the middle of sea, there one minute (if 'there' was a word that could even begin to describe the ephemeral noise-filled bits of 'not-there' that would crop up more and more often when he wasn't looking) and gone the next. Tried not to think on where he was, and where he was going.

The HMS Artemis, and London, the uncramped part of his mind supplied, pronouncing the words with as much care as he had those words of Te Awaroa's alien tongue.

There it was again.

He tried not to think about it, not to think about what he had lost. Tried not to think about what he had left behind in a rush, breathless and bleeding, uprooted from a place he had once come to see as his home. Only when he had found himself aboard the ship, being washed in a tub and administered a stinging liquid that made him cough and his eyes water, had he realised that he was still naked. That he had not taken a single thing with him.

He had kissed the last of the bloodstains on his skin then. The last that remained of Te Awaroa.

He tried not to think about what would have happened to his lover's body by now. Well, not the body – he shuddered at the thought of how Te Matangi would insist on embalming his adopted son's head, to keep him around the house and take him out at ceremonies, the swirls and lines of his tattoo preserved for all eternity, lines he had caressed and kissed so many times. The mouth open in a scream, so much like Te Awaroa's face had been in those moments of rapture... and yet so wrong, so silent. And without those eyes, those shards of sky captured in a beloved face... no more.

One more star in the night sky.

He shook his head violently, staring down at his white knuckles glistening with tears. He had been told all that had happened... that morning. 

Yes, he understood their language. That had come as quite a shock to him once he was ready to accept human contact again. They spoke something that his Standard-speaking mind could decode, and they had been quite happy to accept them as one of their own, coming up with all sorts of explanations of their own accord as to why the strange lad was not familiar with things like whaling ships, the King, the Book of Common Prayer and so on. They had laughingly bandied about any number of places he might come from that would explain this marked lack of knowledge, and Qui-Gon had nodded gratefully. They didn't call him Qui-Gon either, they called him Jinn, or John, or both. Jinn-John, a sing-song sounding merrily across the ship whenever someone needed him.

He had tried to make himself useful, to pay his passage to wherever 'London' was. Whatever 'London' was. Maybe it would help him get closer to what he was looking for. 

Having lost his new home, he might as well go in search of his old one.

*** 

The shirt itched, and Qui-Gon slipped a hand inside the wide collar and scratched luxuriously, idly watched by the man they called Rob, clearly the most talkative of the lot. He had been the one who had filled him in on the events of that dim morning, the morning when three of the ship's men, himself, Henry Jenkins and Peter Balfour, had set out to explore further inland.

They had come across the village quite by accident, and had been approaching very carefully until they spotted the ruined house and the noisy commotion of armed men within. And then everything had gone too fast for them too – it had been Henry Jenkins, apparently a certified coward, who had first caught sight of Qui-Gon lying on the floor, and it had been he who had discharged his firearm (a musket, Rob said. A blaster, something in Qui-Gon's mind said.), killing one of Ketoa's men and drawing attention to the new arrivals and their scary weapon that could slay a man at a distance.

The fierce warriors had been frozen with terror, and even now the tone of amazement in Rob's voice was unmistakable as he recounted how they had cast their weapons aside and fled, leaving only the wounded man and the dead man, and the one clutching the knife. The obsidian knife that broke against Peter Balfour's rusty bayonet.

Ghosts, Qui-Gon thought, glancing wistfully at Peter Balfour's bright red shock of hair. _Patupaiarehe_ , the evil spirits of the netherworld. So that was what the girl Whitireka had seen. 

But he said nothing. There was nothing to say that Rob would understand...

The ghosts had left in a rush, unwelcome as they were by the rest of the Ngati Wainui as they took up the pursuit of the ones that had raided them to kill their chief. The ghosts had retreated to their ship, and Qui-Gon, at a loss for what to think and where to go, had come with them. At least they understood his language.

They had given him clothes, a wide grey linen shirt that itched, and a pair of trousers, brown ones that reminded him of long ago. The bruising in his face had faded, his nose healed but crooked. The marks on his hip were now safely tucked away under fabric once more, the last marks that Ketoa had left on anybody.

Rangirua would just have to take over, under the guidance of the long-lived Te Matangi. He would marry Hineraa, and peace would prevail. 

And he would have to get his tattoo finished by someone else.

Because Ketoa was not going to return. Ketoa had been dragged along with the little armed crowd of ghosts, manhandled aboard the ship. Balfour had told him they kept him chained below deck, and that he would make quite a sensation in the place they were going to, and that he deserved no better. Qui-Gon could not bring himself to go down there, preferring to sleep up on deck when the weather allowed, or tucked away in the aft end on the bales of spare sailcloth, among the barrels of whale oil and bundles of whalebone that the men of London would, he understood, use to make their undergarments from.

Uncomfortable in his own clothes, Qui-Gon fingered the marks on his hip. They refused to itch.

*** 

He had refused to let them cut his hair along with everyone else's, hanging on to his 'love-lock' as Rob affectionately called the thin braid behind his right ear, and growing out the rest of his hair into an untidy near-black mop. He would have grown a beard too, but decided against it for now.

With no mirror, he would not get it to look... right.

*** 

HMS Artemis, on-board log, Qui-Gon Jinn:

_Maybe Rob would understand. Am finding it increasingly amusing to watch him flitting about the deck, courting the favour of the other 'lads'. Some shun him, some don't, but just what is going on below deck I can't bring myself to_

_Anyway, they are just like characters to me, from a story. The ship is a setting, the ending is obvious to all but those in the story._

_Maybe I am in the story._

*** 

As days and tens of days and more passed, the holes in his days became more frequent, and the sharp burning drink that the ship's cook, a fat jovial man called Fernand, administered did nothing to alleviate them at all. Privately, Qui-Gon suspected they made his condition worse, and he surreptitiously tipped the cup over the railing as often as he could get away with. 

Not even the Force helped. It just disappeared in those moments when, well, random bits of the world disappeared. And sometimes all of it. And there was no longer anybody there to fill the voids.

He had not been much use as a worker recently, what with bits of rope just slipping through his fingers because his fingers insisted they weren't there, or not hearing orders because his ears said there were no orders. Fernand and Rob were the only ones not laughing. They had become interested in his condition, and had taken to watching him. 

Rob had given him paper and a pencil so that he could keep a log, and he had made use of that facility abundantly. He wrote down all he could think of – his memories of Te Awaroa's village, his memories of the place before, the daily occurrences aboard the HMS Artemis. 

Even here, the pages he kept tucked into the pocket of his trousers were riddled with beginnings, and half-finished sentences ending in a patch of nothing. Ever more often. 

***

HMS Artemis, on-board log Qui-Gon Jinn:

_The sea looks no different, when it does, from what it looked like yesterday, and the days before. We left a harbour behind a few days ago, a smelly little place full of noise a_

_Noisy, and full of busy creatures, bustling about as if there was an underlying grief they were trying their hardest to cover up. Balfour told me the name of the place, he returned drunk and ostensibly happy._

_The name of the place escapes me. It is not home. Nor, I have been assured, is it London._

*** 

He had taken to writing down others' words, no longer trusting his own, and that was the only job he could reliably do at the moment. Fernand would not let him anywhere near the knives in the kitchen, and Rob had convinced the captain that making the new lad scrub the deck was not a good idea given that the new lad occasionally simply did not see the deck, and they did not want a good Christian soul scrubbing the wide ocean, now did they?

They did not, and so Qui-Gon, or Jinn-John, spent his days on deck, writing letters to the sailors' loved ones in his large uneven hand, putting the thoughts of grateful illiterates on paper, pausing occasionally to silently weep at words of love he could no longer say, and pausing occasionally because all that was coming out of the sailor's mouth was a bit of mechanical noise and the ship had momentarily disappeared, leaving him floundering six feet above a non-existent ocean.

It was these falling moments that had made him refuse a hammock, and it was these falling moments that made him seek sleep in the middle of the day some days, to keep him from falling out of wherever here and now was.

The captain's books and Fernand's traditional medicines had proved fruitless, as had all sorts of distraction or occupation. Even Peter Balfour's dreadful singing, and the half-learned discussions Rob Greene kept trying to involve him in did little to keep his mind where it was. If it was. At least it should be.

For someone who doesn't have much of an idea where I'm coming from, and even less of an idea where I'm going, he thought, I'm surprisingly stubborn in wanting to be where I am.

He snorted amusedly at his own turn of phrase, listened to the quiet creak of the rigging erase the memory of that sound from his mind, curled up on the pile of rope and sailcloth, and tried to be content being where he was.

And failed, because he no longer was where he was.


	25. (In which Qui-Gon tidies up the place)

There were so many logs, Qui-Gon thought absently, so many reports and summaries and notes and footnotes and diaries. So much to tidy up if he wanted some semblance of space in the little room. And it would not be fair not to give him that space.

There was the log he had kept himself, pencil on damp-curled paper, aboard the HMS Artemis, the ship's name scrawled across the top of each entry in bold letters, as if to remind himself. Well, he had probably needed it, at the time. Ten years ago. Nowadays, he marvelled at how he had managed to keep writing so close to his relapse.

There were the healers' logs, copies of which he had requested and been granted. There was the report Llipe had been made to file, which she had done, contritely, in front of the entire Council. Qui-Gon remembered her terrified face well. He remembered staring at it for longer than a minute before finding words to address her with. The markings on her chin had held all his attention. Natural, on her they were natural, irregular longish blotches of darker brown on her brown skin, as if a flame had licked along her chin. Hine, he had thought.

There were Padawan-missing-in-action reports. There was even a list of messages that had come in during what had been perceived as unscheduled absence from Temple (he wondered, now, why he had kept the list. Surely not because he wanted to be reminded that Llipe's obnoxious pink-haired friend had sent a few flirty messages before giving up and moving on?).

There were the diaries he had kept himself, starting after his discharge from the Healers' ward. Reacquainting himself with home had been easy, too easy for his own tastes, as if he hadn't been away anywhere stranger than a routine mission or a recreational trip. His Master had been a great help, compassionate but never intrusive, and even his need to confess to the virtual pages of his datapads had dried up fairly soon. There just hadn't been that much to confess. Life had gone on, and on.

There were logs, and reports, and diaries. And yet one was missing, the most vital of them all, the one that had held his entire mind at the time, so small, but so full. The one that had been crushed into the ground under the assault of their bodies entangled in a fierce embrace...

That I should be missing a leaf, Qui-Gon thought. 

The man... him I miss too much to even put it into words.

*** 

As his hands worked tirelessly at dusting off the shelves and pallet in the small room, his mind circled around that leaf. He remembered its exact colour, its feel, how the crudely carved letters had looked on the surface. And that it had been called _harakeke_.

He had not found mention of the language, or the people, in any of the wide resources available at Temple or outside it. What few words he had, he had entered into any number of search droids, typed in what he hoped would represent their phonic value, finally spoken in a trembling voice. They came up blank, again and again.

He had wondered, in the small hours of the quiet nights in his Knight's quarters, if what he remembered more and more incompletely had actually been real. Had turned the thought over and over in his mind and found no way to get at it, one way or another. His rational, Jedi side told him to put it aside, to believe in hallucinogens and his unusual genetic make-up. Told him to believe in rows of little letters in a text box at the bottom of his medical file, now highlighted deep orange and linked across to all other similar specimens.

His heart, there where the tendrils of his connection to the Living Force lay, told him that no mere speeder accident could leave him with such a precise and delicately blackened set of scars. And that no dream, however vivid, could leave him with the deep sense of love and forlornness that the... episode ten years ago had.

Sighing, Qui-Gon put the last of his physical memories aside, laying them on his bed for the time being. He would find a place for them eventually – after all he had managed ten years without looking at them again. Had managed quite well. Everyone who knew him, and didn't know him all too well, would swear that Padawan Jinn had picked up where he had left off, and that Knight Jinn was on his way to becoming a great and bloody scary Jedi Master.

His own Master, privately, had suggested he consider taking on a Padawan. After ten years of wearing your heels down in the service of the Order, he had joked, you had better pass some of your wisdom on before the next planet along decides to keep you, and for good this time.

So this was why he was tidying up. There would be a boy moving into the spare room, at least until they had found suitable quarters for a training pair. He had picked him at random (at a nudge from the Force, Dooku had corrected with that smug benevolent grin of his. Even at nearly 70, he had not lost that), and studied his file quite extensively over the last few days. He did not want to get anything wrong, not overlook anything. And his academic standards were more than satisfactory, his species was compatible (a human like him, though from a different system), and Master Dooku remembered noticing him among a group of Initiates a few years ago, and had highly recommended him. The only thing Qui-Gon had not actually done yet was to meet him.

Which was why he was standing in the 'fresher now, trying his best to make himself look presentable, or at least non-intimidating. He frowned at the face in the mirror, that old man of not even thirty years, traced the deep lines on his forehead, under his eyes, branching out from beside his crooked nose. Traced the lines on the surface of the mirror, completing them, willing them to appear black as they had been, artful as they had been, beloved as they had been. Beloved as they still were.

Sighing, Qui-Gon threaded his fingers through his long hair, well aware of the first individual grey hairs showing up amid the thick brown mane, and tied the top half back in his customary style, away from his face. Nobody had questioned his growing it out after his Knighting, and nobody had commented on the short narrow beard that left his cheeks uncovered and surrounded his mouth with even brown bristles.

Nobody would comment, here. It was not like this was unheard of for a human Knight.

One of many, Qui-Gon thought. When I see myself in the mirror, I see one of a kind. 

I still see him.

*** 

Qui-Gon closed the door of his quarters behind himself, vowing to add to the pile of diaries on his bed. He would most likely have to start taking notes again anyway, seeing as he now had, in all probability, a young boy to look after, to teach and guide and quite possibly suffer. A young boy who he would meet for the first time in about five minutes.

Squaring his shoulders and banishing the gloom from his mind, Qui-Gon set off along the corridor.

*** 

"Qui! Good to see you – taking your pick of the crop, I hear?" Llipe, brushing one hand over her once-more short spiky hair as if to illustrate her precarious pun. Qui-Gon nodded at her in greeting, wondering for the hundredth time how on Coruscant she had managed to convince the Council to put her in charge of Initiate junior education, as was evident from the practical haircut and the paint stains on her utilitarian skirt. Given her history, that must have been quite a feat of convincing, he thought.

"Mmh. Don't tell me you know all about it too?"

"Oh, you're in for a good one, Jinn. I've been following his progress on and off after he left my tier. He's made a bit of a name for himself while you were away doing the same for yourself on your missions, _Knight_ Jinn. Say, you really haven't met him before?"

"Not that I'm aware of, no."

"Ah, we'll see. I bet when you set eyes on young Kenobi, you'll say 'oh, _that's_ him. Sure I've seen him around before'. Just wait and see, Qui."

Nodding a friendly farewell and brushing one hand over Llipe's shoulder, Qui-Gon walked on, trying not to be late.

He could see the small figure leaning against the windowsill at their appointed meeting place, outside Master Dooku's rooms. Short for his age, Qui-Gon thought as he approached, observing as the silhouette in Initiate tunics began to resolve itself into a boy. The light caught on faintly reddish hair, falling about his face in gentle chin-length waves.

The face, when it turned towards him, made Qui-Gon tense all over, fighting to contain the scream tearing at his throat from within. The hair was reddish, and the eyes were grey, but – 

The face. The lips. The cleft chin. The _birthmarks_.

All he saw was Ketoa.


	26. (In which a word regains meaning)

4167 Republic Standard, 24th ten, personal log Qui-Gon Jinn:

_He is totally like Ketoa. I don't know why I let myself be talked into this. The insistence. The way he tells me how things ought to be, and how he makes them so. Why this one needs a Master at all escapes me. Why this Master ended up being me escapes me even more. Some days I can't face him, him and his permanently drawn-together brows with all that mind behind them, all that mind I can't read._

_I am not going through with this. For both our sakes._

*** 

4167 Republic Standard, 25th ten, personal log Qui-Gon Jinn:

_Obi-Wan, his name is Obi-Wan. His eyes are grey, and lively, and without guile. His hair is reddish, and he wears the braid of apprenticeship. Sometimes I need to remind myself of these facts, because I still don't believe them._

_He is a good student, maybe a little too clever for his own good. He will stick by the rules even if that means bending himself to suit them, and coming up with versions I have never thought of. It is, after all, something Jedi are brought up to do, and was I really any different, all those years ago? Master assures me I wasn't._

_His name is Obi-Wan, and he is my apprentice._

***

4170 Republic Standard, 8th ten, personal log Qui-Gon Jinn:

_Obi-Wan got an honorary mention from Master Eeth today, in front of all the Council, for the preliminary work he did on settling the Beshan situation. Never mind that he wasn't present to take it, I'm sure everyone else will keep him informed, even though I know he won't believe me when I tell him. So self-effacing, my boy._

_He was probably out in the underground salles again, working on his forms now that he's growing and there's suddenly rather more of him than he is used to. Anyway, he was nowhere to be found, an occurrence that's become more and more frequent in recent months._

_Not that that worries me. Sometimes I marvel at how at ease I've become with him, letting the personal differences between us itch but not injure. He is nothing like me, and yet he worships me, pushing himself to his limits trying to live up to the expectations he thinks I have._

_Well, no. He is like me. Like I was when I was sixteen. Except more advanced in his studies, more... more mature, I suppose. He feels older to me, earnest beyond his years. Striving to be a great Jedi, and I am sure that is what he will be. I'm not sure how much of that he will be able to learn from me, but I am certain he will find other sources._

_Nothing if not resourceful, my apprentice. He makes me proud, my Obi-Wan._

*** 

4171 Republic Standard, 39th ten, personal log Qui-Gon Jinn:

_I'm just going to start writing words here. I've long despaired of trying to find the perfect opening sentence, haven't even written in this log for almost a year. I can't not say it, can't not admit it to myself in this most private of files, and yet I'm strangely terrified of seeing it in print on the screen, as if the words, once solidified, had a power that could make them leap off the page and make themselves heard across the room, through the door behind which my Padawan is doubtless ensconced in his studies..._

_You're stalling, Jinn. The fact that you're writing 'you're stalling' is proof enough._

_See, I had never thought I would feel like this again. Had not known there were places still empty in this soul. Not after I'd pulled myself together so well... and it's been, what, fourteen years? Strange how I didn't notice the empty spaces until I felt them filled. Filled to bursting._

_He is a wondrous thing, my Padawan. He has moved in and set up home in my mind, probably while I wasn't looking. He... no, there still aren't words for this. I'll just have to make do with clichés. He reads me like an open book, not aloud, just quietly to himself. He fits me so perfectly. Sometimes I feel like we could have whole conversations with just 'hm's and glances, trusting the other to think the exactly matching thought._

_He makes me proud, and he makes me glow. He makes me want to love him._

_Hells, I love him already. I'm just scared to admit it._

_There, I have. Now, if only he could read that part of me too, without me having to say it. I've never been good with words, even in my own language..._

*** 

4171 Republic Standard, 40th ten, personal log Qui-Gon Jinn:

_Those long glances he's giving me, thoughtful. In the evenings, his eyes are almost blue. They remind me, and I can't find it in me to feel pain at the sharpness of the memory. Fact is, his eyes are blue then, islands of sky. And they call me by my real name._

_I wish I could be certain enough to answer._

*** 

4171 Republic Standard, 42nd ten, personal log Qui-Gon Jinn:

_He said a wondrous thing today._

_He said 'I know,' and I knew it was the answer. The answer to the question that wasn't a question, the answer to the answer I dared not give._

_Stop being cryptic, Jinn, this is your own diary. Fact is, he... answers my feelings. And there may not be many more words to say in this log._

_I suspect I won't want to find the time._

*** 

Soft panting stirred the hairs in Qui-Gon's groin. A face deliciously ticklish with evening stubble nuzzled against his spent and softening flesh, murmuring little kisses against the tender skin. 

The spiky reddish head stirred a little, smiling blue-grey eyes rising up to meet his like small stars. A pair of very possessive arms tightened around his waist, nearly lifting him off the mattress. Shaking him a little as if he needed waking from his orgasm-induced limpness. His Obi-Wan-induced blissful limpness.

The sweet pink mouth, so talented and single-minded, came into view, doing what it did best. Well, second best, after what it had just done. Third best, after that and smirking. It spoke.

"Master?"

"What are you calling me, brat?"

A snort. "Qui-Gon, don't pretend you're mentally present enough to lecture me on etiquette. Not when you're shouting other people's names as you come!"

"I didn't –"

"No, you didn't." Obi-Wan nuzzled against his lover's belly, noisily blowing some really hot breath into his navel, fingertips trailing absently over the smooth black marks on the older man's hip. "But you did shout something there... made me think it meant something."

"I was shouting...?"

Obi-Wan grinned. "You most certainly were, Master," he purred. "It sounded like, well... there was a lot of 'aaaaaah' first. As is to be expected under the circumstances," he nipped lightly at Qui-Gon's flesh, "but then it ended in '...aaaarahaa'. Or something similar."

"Aroha?"

"Quite possibly. Care to be made to repeat it?" The smirk on his apprentice's face was altogether too much, and Qui-Gon pressed the grinning face against his skin, away from eye contact he was not sure he could hold.

He was quite sure he was blushing, though.

Still, who else could he be truthful with? And what harm lay in the truth of this particular word? After all, he was absolutely certain he had applied it to one worthy of it.

Taking a deep breath and stroking Obi-Wan's hair, Qui-Gon said, "Aroha. It means – love."

"Oh," Obi-Wan breathed, raising his face against the gentle resistance of his Master's hand. "Aroha." He smiled. "Aroha. Is that the word for love on your homeworld?"

Qui-Gon swallowed, then lowered his eyes, feeling the word coming into its own again, here, and now.

"Yes."

\--- The End ---


End file.
